What is social media?

Even your teenager would be able to answer this.

Face book, Orkut, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress or LinkedIn.

The latest buzz is the Google Buzz, The Search Engine Master too has augmented in the Social Media Segment.

No one wants to lag behind. Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo and Google all have a hand shake with twitter, to milk the enormous market share, the micro-blogger posses.

What’s that makes Social Media site, The Head turner?

Man is a social animal; this traditional adage explains the human urge for social interaction.

Social Media Sites blazes into the masses due to their high accessibility and scalable publishing techniques.  It is a platform that connects you to the entire world, through text, images or videos.

The traditional forms of social Interactions transferred the media from ‘one-to-many’. Today the social interaction sites makes media reach from’ many-to-many’.

How it becomes a Media for marketing?

Social Interaction sites or Social Media sites slip the messages in; subtly, through the back door, very elegantly and diplomatically. It creates a ‘pull effect’.

It transforms the ‘content consumers’ to ‘content producers’.

Such a site opens a doorway, to your product, business, weblog or website. Then you form relationships with those coming in contact, by interacting with them.  The relationships have ample scope to reach to new levels, when people start following you or your content.

It comprehensively and judiciously integrates analytics, SEO, Banner Advertising, Flash Games, Widgets, Rich Media and Mobile Communication. If you can tune in with the possibilities this immense integration provides, you can certainly create Brand awareness and generate ‘leads’ and ‘sales’.

The flavors of Social Media sites:

Blogging sites,

Social networking sites,

Micro blogging sites,

Image sharing sites and

Video sharing sites,

The platter has variations to match your needs and keep you socially involved.

How the www has webbed around it:

Many new concepts and services have come up with the advent of social Media Sites.

With the marketing tools and concepts like social Media optimization, social media marketing and others, web marketers are leaving no stones unturned, to reap the immense business possibilities associated with social Media and Interaction.

Every day, we find a new feature coming up in the online scene, which magnifies the scope of business through such social media sites even more.

To exemplify a few,

Micro Blogging phenomena has given rise to URL shortening, Celebrity Tweeting , Account verification and many more such concepts.

A host of interactive games flourish through the Social networking sites.

A crowd of business concepts like, Bookmarking, content writing and Link building revolves around Blogging.

What some might consider drawbacks:

Time consuming, privacy invading and wrought with annoying marketers, a critic might find these as show stoppers for Social media market.

But when introduced to the nostalgic experience one has when you reconnect to someone in the past, even a loner would start acknowledging the benefits that come along.

Its like a room full of people, enjoying each other’s company, sharing ideas and contacts, with each other, playing interactive games. So what are you waiting for…? Join the party!

Unlike any other form of advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) requires a collaborative effort between different departments. Three groups are generally involved in an effective making of a PPC campaign. Content writers who will research for relevant keywords and, which will go to be included in the ads. The ad managers who will oversee the performance and relatives going into the bidding processes, and finally the developers who will help implement technical details like the tracking codes.

Content Management

To begin with, it would be ideal to separate content with search. The contextual listings, campaigns need to be viewed differently from search since the results and customers also differ in this online marketing scenario.

Eliminating unwanted and waste traffic is a necessity and essential step to lowering costs and improving conversions. Most major pay-per-click providers will let advertisers create lists of negative keywords, which would eventually reduce traffic. However, this amounts to the wasteful traffic which would have eaten into your purse without adding any conversions.

It is easy to get traffic, what with you standing on the right side of the first SERP. Persuading the visitor, however, to make a purchase is another story. It would be smarter if in some way the pay-per-click advertiser is able to weed out all unwanted traffic and pay only for those conversions he is able to make. It is very important to keep an eye on the costs per conversion. This will mean cost-per-conversion is more relevant for the advertiser than paying per click.

Ad-campaign Managers

One way to control spending, here is by adjusting bid amounts, and not daily budget spending. Very often the funds are simply not available and demanding; but, if the campaign is correctly optimized, the returns should justify any amounts of spending. Advertisers should carefully lower the bidding costs in order to reach the maximum number of target customers. Daily budget control based spending leaves a lot of prospective customers untapped.

Usually, the number one spot leads to a very poor return on investment. Mostly, traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers, but simply are researchers. Serious buyers will generally go to the third, fourth, or fifth positions. However, when the consumers are ready to buy, they will often come back.

Bid exact, use exact matching, eliminate researchers and go straight to buyers. The traffic will decrease, but conversion and online revenue should definitely increase. Double and triple the keywords by creating broad, exact and phrase matches for every keyword. Review the analytics, then gradually eliminate broad and phrase matches that generally result in lower conversion rates.

Analytics & Developers

A reliable analytics program is essential in managing a successful PPC campaign. It is the backbone of this marketing campaign, which will be able to determine many important factors. Analytics will enable you get costs per conversion rates, unwanted visitor data, negative keyword lists, figures relating to return on investments, and such other dependable analytical data.

Your PPC campaign has got all the ingredients to prove to be a breakthrough in your online marketing and advertising campaigns, provided you play a thorough and professional game. Careful analytics will highly compensate, and being innovative will help you effectively encounter any challenge.

Make no mistake. In the kind of ocean the world-wide-web is, it is essential that you learn to navigate if you do not want to get lost. Building a strategy for your online business is going to help you reach your destination easier and faster. In the absence of being strategic, most of these untargeted efforts would only prove to be a big waste of efforts, money and time. Not knowing your way, or the marks that you want to set are a huge disadvantage to begin with.

Looking strategically is big help

Strategy is a lot about how to think more holistically. It enables you to be innovative, lead teams while helping you deliver value tactically daily.  Shouting at people through television ads are actually days of the past when it comes to online marketing, and no more does this work like it used to. The consumers are really looking at different forms of consuming media, the social media scenario is a good example of this changing scenario.

Seeing what you would have otherwise missed

Normally, we are all on the ‘hit’ mode, and trying to work things out in order to generate value. We are constantly working out, planning and making our way through the thick and the thin of the day. Since we lose a strategic eye, there are a lot of instances, which come as glaring situations or opportunities that simply tend to pass by.

The big question is, when you are busy spinning the wheel and trying to get work done, are you really having the time to provide value to the organization?

You’ll miss the bus. This is why, being strategic gives you an opportunity to derive more of value in this marathon. This will mean, halting your daily grind, analyzing a consumer and finding what exactly are they looking for. Understanding the media and developing contacts with them, and giving them a clear picture of what your plans are all about. Looking at data to understand patterns, user behavior and other relevant feeds; this will mean that as a strategic thinker you are providing more value by increasing your customer list, and actively engaging, re-engaging and retaining customers.

Set aside time to think

Set aside time on a daily or weekly structure to think more holistically as a marketer should. Get to know what people really want from you. Marketing is not pushing or advertising products or services, it is about truly understanding what is important in a marketplace. It is a process of creating value in an industry which will eventually lead to obtaining customers and retaining them.

Take professional help

Consultants will be very helpful for strategically thinking over problems in any organization. Firstly, they provide a fresh set of eyes with a wide angled outlook for your business. They are capable and will be more objective about features, content and other aspects. They will externally analyze a business, an industry, and the customer, and suggest recommendations that you can implement.

Moreover, consultants are also tacticians who help alleviate your daily support needs. Whether it is managing communities, managing SEO or PPC campaigns and many other factor professionals can effectively address. The truth, however, is that they will be able to give you that free time, which you needed to think strategically. After all you know your business better than anyone  else ever can.

Your web strategy is crucial

Spend enough time developing your web strategy. It is very important to think strategically as businesses begin to evolve online. Understanding the growing online market is more important now than ever to make that difference which will set you apart. Your web strategy is what will chart your course and help you score for a long, long time.

Finding the correct website, information or product on the ever expanding World Wide Web would have been a daunting task had the search engines not come to our rescue. All that these search engines want us to do, is to apply a simple logic and put a keyword for the search. Within a fraction of a second, Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) come up with thousands of matching results.
However, who has the patience and time to go around all the result links for information? Amazingly more than two-third net users never go beyond the first page that have approximately ten results per page. What does this signify? It means if you want the net users to visit your page or site, it must rank within the first ten. Only then your website has some chances to generate hits and traffic. In this regard, link-wheel building strategy is an effective tool to ensure that your website ends up at the top or at least on the first page, if not closer than that.
What is a link-wheel?
Link-wheel is a structural representation of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique that utilizes various web entities in order to drive more traffic to the target web site.
Parts of link-wheel
Hub: Your website is indeed a hub or the centre of your link wheel. Whatever link building activity we carry out, it is all concentrated towards making our website more popular.
Rim: Web 2.0 provides us the rim or circumference that enables us to revolve around our target site. Logically, like any mechanical device, this rim also enables us to keep in motion without moving out of hand.
Spokes: Web entities like hub pages, blogs, social networking sites, slide sharing, video sharing, bookmarking and all such other web properties give us the strength to make use of and manage this wheel, for our mutual benefits.
Other patterns
Horse shoe: It is an open ended link pattern, in which links are connected to each other but does not form a close loop. This sure will give us movement, but with a very restricted momentum.
Random links: This type of link building pattern does not follow any specific modem. The links are built at random from one site to other and are without any design. Chaos is here used as the ultimate design, and which may, or may not come so useful in time.
Layers of link-wheels
Number of layers in a link wheel will go on increasing with the number of Web2.0 properties we go on adding externally to the already existing links that we have, and, which may fatten-up like a tree trunk with time.
Link building is a very open chapter still, and new and innovative strategies can be adopted for optimizing results. So get on, open up your minds and make the most of this while there is time.
The sky is no limit really; it is only a vast & open space in time.

A whole lot of time is spent in generating external links due to the common belief that ranking for highly competitive keywords are only based on it rather than website structure and internal linking. SEO analysts with all the external links stuff end up forgetting that the most relevant keyword rich pages are right under their nose. Thousands of pages gather in a website over a period of time. The systematic logical linking of these pages is very important.  But the placement of internal links is very important. Just throwing links internally irrelevantly can be termed as internal linking and it will be indexed by the crawlers as spamming.

Tight Bonding with Internal Links

• Internal links help to generate relevance between web pages and keywords. The internal links helps the search engines to index the most important internal pages easily. Let us assume that there are 1000 pages on your website referring to various keywords.

• The simplest way to increase your ranking is to make sure that all the pages of your website are scanned by search engine crawlers and they are indexed for relevant keyword phrases. But pages can get hidden from search engines if internal linking is not done logically. This is the case with many using navigation scripts.

• The relevancy of page and relevancy of the anchor text in the internal link matters a lot. Let us assume that you have a gadget repairing company. Rather than linking your home page by using an anchor text like “home”, link to it using “gadget repairing home”. This will attach the keywords to the link to your page. Same goes for linking the internal pages. Make sure you use the phrases in the anchor text that you want to target on the linking page. Suppose you want to target HP laptop repairs page, rather than leaving the link at some flashy graphic, add the phrase and add the internal link on it. This will give your site an advantage when that keyword phrase is searched.

• Always identify the crowd pulling pages on your website. Create a section called “Hot topics” and link these pages from the home page. This helps in flow of link juice to support high value keywords which are not covered adequately on the lower page . The page rank has a peculiar characteristics related with the home page.  The closer the page is from the homepage. The higher page rank it gets. But the vice versa is not true. Linking every page to the home page diffuses the weight of individual links. The main keyword phrases need to be sorted out. Find out which pages you want to rank for these keywords and include text links for these particular ones on your home page. Make sure you pick solid pages to target these keyword phrases. Solid in the sense the pages which show the content related to actual searched keyword.

• Text link navigation, footers and inline text links are the three main methods that can be used to improve internal links structure. In test link navigation, you do not have to cram your keywords on the home page. Use your keyword in every second or third link. Keep the footers well optimized. Clean them of junk, add proper keyword relevant anchor texts. Make sure that a link to the site map is included in the footer.  Internal test links are the links which are placed in the content of the page. Here make sure that the link you provide is entirely relevant to the content on the landing page.

Thus simply changing the internal navigation will not give you the desired result. Only logical and systematic internal link building will help your entire site to get crawled and that too for proper and relevant keyword phrases.