It’s designed to get more visitors to your web site and get higher search engine rankings.

All you have to do positing yourself in the middle of the most current conversation that’s going on right on the web. It doesn’t matter what field your in – there will be an opportunity to participate.

Here’s an example. Turn on the news at the time of those writing and you will see extensive news coverage of the wildfires burning in LA right now.

We have a client that sells pine straw mulch; how easy would it be right now to write an article on their blog concerning forest preservation, pine tree health etc. etc. and reference the current events ?

( I am really not an expert on pine straws – but I hope you see the possibilities).
That blog post will get picked up very easily by the search engines especially through their respective  blog outlets and from there on it’s just a matter of time until either people will link to you, cite you or best case scenario the post will be picked up by some news outlet.

That approach works in any industry at any time; regardless if you are employing a Vero Beach Seo Company or not.

I thought to myself: Are there actually any web design companies out there with at least the slightest clue about search engine optimization or do they just not care?

No matter how “pretty “you think is website is, it all doesn’t matter if nobody finds your site.

Let’s address a couple of very basic key points you should address with your web design company. (If they have no idea what you are talking about – run fast and run far.)
They are only a couple of basic elements on a webpage that search engines will take into consideration when determining how relevant the site is whenever somebody types in a search term.

Let’s assume you sell “red shoes” and naturally you very much would like your site to show up at least on the first page somewhere.

It doesn’t matter your “pretty “your site looks – if the search engine doesn’t think it’s relevancy to “red shoes ” it’s not going to show up anywhere.

Search engines can only “look “at a couple of basic things on your website. The CANNOT see how pretty it is and in general they can’t images at all.

Basic elements each website needs to have:

1. Title Tag – each website is written in code ( there are several out there ) but no matter which code is being used they all have the ability to insert a tag that’s called a title tag : i.e. <title> red shoes</title> could be the title tag for a page about red shoes.

Without it you basically stand zero chance to show up for a search term.
2. Meta description – similar to the title tag you can use this tag to tell the search engines and your visitors what your web page is all about. Don’t go overboard here; 2 – 3 short sentences are all you need.
3. Keyword tags – funnily that’s seems to be the one most widely known ( I guess stemming back to the dark ages of search engine optimization when you could just ” stuff ” as many keywords as possible in that tag. ) That’s precisely the reason Google for example almost entirely discounts the presence or content of keyword tags. In other words it has almost become completely obsolete. (If your web design company proudly boast to you that they will put as many keywords as possible on your site – do the running thingy again )
4. Text – call it text call it content, call it whatever you like – just make sure it’s on your page. I know it often clashes with the “pretty thing ” . Make it relevant to the title or subject your page is all about.

I.e. having a page titled “red shoes ” but all the text is about ” white wedding dresses : won’t give you many brownie points with the search engines.
And No – flash doesn’t count as ” text”. You might be able to read it – search engines can’t.

4a. Keyword Density – a measure how often your keywords show up in relation the overall amount of text – Popular notion nowadays is that it’s not important – well popular notion is wrong – we’ve tested it. We’ve had jumps in ranking by several hundred spots by simply adjusting the keyword density on a page. Challenge is that there is no set number what’s required. It varies wildly from market to market.

After all that is in place we can talk about design. I am talking about design that is geared towards having the customer perform a specific action. It’s not about bein pretty.
On average you have 10-15 seconds before your visitor decides to take another action on your site or hit the back button.

Take a look at this eye tracking heat map. The dark red areas are the ones that are being scanned and clicked on the most.
These actions vary from business to business. If you have an ecommerce store you want to make the transaction as painless as possible. I.e. easy to find order button – prominent displayed logos from the BBB – shipping cost displayed etc. etc.
If you are a local doctor’s or dentist office – make it easy for them to contact you – make you phone number the most prominent thing on your page – don’t hide it shamefully in a corner or worse in the footer of the page.

When it comes to human behavior – everybody behaves like a 5 year old (I do – You do it) we are not reading – we are scanning. We are drawn to bullet points. We follow arrows. We like bolded text.

Don’t think your clients are “too sophisticated “for that kind of behavior. We tested 2 links:

Red Shoe Selection

CLICK HERE RED SHOE Selection

The second link got clicked on 5 times as much as the first one, because we told them what to do (CLICK HERE)

In short: First make sure to give yourself the advantage by using all the tags that are available to you. Secondly make sure your website is easy to use for your visitors.

Many search engine optimization experts will spend much time on
meta tags,keyword density, and site structure etc.

Some of these things are still important (The search engines
haven’t paid attention to meta tags for quite some time though!). However, there’s something much bigger to worry about.

You can prove this to yourself.

Do a Google search for the term “click here”. I just did that and
got 2.5 BILLION search results. I would classify that as a pretty
competitive term!!

But…if you have a look at the first listing that comes up. It’s
for Adobe Acrobat’s reader. If you go to that page, you’ll see
that nowhere on the page does that phrase even exist! So much for
keyword density (it’s not in the meta tags either).

So, why is it #1 ?

Because, the number one factor that dictates where your site shows
up in the search engine listings is who links to your pages, and
how they link (specifically what’s the text that’s “clickable”).

Adobe has thousands of sites linked to that page saying “click
here” to get Adobe’s acrobat reader.

Because the search engines track these things, and consider this
very strongly when ranking sites…they think the page is about…

Click Here

Mystery solved.

It stands to reason then, that in order to rank highly in the
search engines, you must have a large quantity of quality links to
your site with the “clickable” phrase being the keyword you wish
to rank for.

Hope this made sense!

Really nothing new there, except when talking to people I realized that we all are utilizing these sites in very different ways in their effort of social media marketing. Let’s take a look at some different methods, this could work.
1. heavy social interaction

One could say these sites were originally build with that purpose in mind. Members interacting with each other around a particular topic; and on every site you will find always a group of people that are heavily engaged and constitute themselves a kind of authority on that site.

Some do it for the sheer ” ego factor ” some are very specialized smart marketers. I actually one “followed” an account on blogher.com that started out innocently enough as an avid commenter and slowly added more and more ” offers ” into his/her content. The community didn’t seem to mind because at that point he/she was trusted and respected enough.

The obvious downside to this approach is that it’s not really scalable, unless you could effectively outsource the task. Also it will take time to see results.

2. mass creation of accounts

On the opposite side of the spectrum would be to mass create these accounts with some specialized software. While very time efficient there is not a software out there that can take full advantage of special features that vary from site to site. That way you will miss out on some seo benefits that way.

3. somewhere in between

That’s really what I am trying to do. I will take my time to fill out a profile and I will post manually my content on these sites. That way I can fully control the link building ( a major shortcoming of any software I have ever tried ). It also reduces the chances of being blocked significantly; though it does happen from time to time

The setup on some sites is really seo friendly, albeit hard to find sometimes. Ideally I am looking for :

. profile page -that allows link to homepage
. blog feature – where content can be published
. link feature – a place that allows to point more links to my other sites ( think blogroll )
. rss feed
. group feature – create a new group based on your topic
. rss feed for group

The way I structure my content pages on these sites is probably not the most time efficient way, bit works for me. Most of my main ( $$ ) sites are data feed driven sites. On these sites either a particular product or category will become the keyword/topic that web 2.0 properties are build around on.

1. link to product/category
2. image link to either merchant or product page
3. direct link to merchant
4. link to related web 2.0 property ( optional )

Some web 2.0 sites frown upon having affiliate links in the content – so for ease of use and tracking purpose I just redirect the through a site like hopurl.com ( the basic version is free ).