5 lectures from top founders and CEOs. Get social media training for your business!

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Dan Martell, Co-Founder of Flowtown Introduction to Social Media Marketing

How to use social to launch, position your messaging and get distribution.
Foundation: Keywords and Position
Take a Guess
Deal in High Volume
Utilize Tools
Stew Langille, Vice President of Marketing at Mint.com Creating Engaging Content

Creating content in a variety of mediums – writing blog posts, engaging tweets or video/podcast/etc.
Content is King
Talk about the problem, not about your solution
Distribution
Engaging blog writing / tweeting
Writing great headlines
Laura Lippay, Search and Social Marketing Consultant Improving Your Search Rankings With Social Media

A look into how search and social interact with each other
Using Search to Own Social
Control the Discussion
Feed Traffic Back
Social Sucess = Search Visibility
Writing great headlines
Jeff Widman, Founder of Brandglue.com Leveraging Your Audience to Increase Your Reach

What makes people want to share? How to make your content shareable – technically and psychologically.
Social Means Sharing
Make it easy
Ask at the right time
Social Proof
Building Twitter Followers
Website
Build an Initial List
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder of awe.sm Optimizing and Measuring Your Impact

This section is focused on the metrics and analysis side of social.
Conversion Metrics
Simple URL tracking
Social Conversions
Word of Click
Email to share
What should you track?

Table of Contents

Over 6 lectures and 3.5 hrs of content!
Gain traction when starting with nothing
Set effective social media goals
Create content that relates to your audience
Optimize your search visibility with social media.
Turn all this social buzz into real momentum
Optimize your content for Facebook
Measure the effect of your campaigns

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Dan Martell

Online marketing, social media, technology, startups and working my @ss off to change the world.
Dan Martell skydives and snowboards and believes running is among the secrets to a fruitful life. But the 31-year-old Moncton, N.B., native insists business is his sport.

With a background in computer programming but no formal business training, Dan’s passion for technology and business has meant he has had a hand in launching several companies to date.

Dan has been described as not having a “knowing-doing gap.” At 25, and just 10 months into his 2004 start-up, Spheric Technologies Inc., the Canadian firm was landing so many deals south of the border that instead of seeking visa sponsorships for his traveling employees, he moved quickly to set up a U.S. office. Growing by an average of 152% per year, Spheric raked in three business awards before he sold the company in mid-2008.

An award winning Entrepreneur, Dan recently co-founded Flowtown, a social marketing platform focused on helping small businesses achieve real results in the world of social media. Now living in San Francisco, Martell spends the majority of his time looking at ways to build a bridge between Silicon Valley and New Brunswick. As an informal angel investor, he is active in advising entrepreneurs using the Lean Startup approach to gain market adoption.

An avid reader who dreams of remaining a lifelong student, Dan invests in startups whose opportunities and ideas he can get excited about. His philosophy is to build companies that solve the business problems he faces. He takes risks in work and life and focuses on the journey over the reward. Martell is relentless in his work ethic – if a job has to get done, he’ll do it right away.

Martell is a board member of Propel ICT and StartupWeekend, a startup advisor to YearOneLabs and 500Startups. He is passionately involved in facilitating micro-lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries through the non-profit, Kiva.org.

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Here are 3 things I wish someone had told me when I launched my own blog seven years ago. Maybe, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have struggled so much in the beginning! You Will Struggle for Topics Most of my clients tell me that coming up with topics for their blog is the hardest part of investing in a content marketing strategy. They either think that A) their industry is boring (in which case I think it’s time to find a job you like!) or B) no one is interested in hearing what they have to say. That’s not the case! Your industry is only as boring as you make it out to be.

Originally posted here:

Being Realistic About Your Content Marketing Campaign — A SPN Exclusive Article

Source: SiteProNews Recent Articles

In part 2 of our series about SEO best practices we discussed optimizing the different types and format of content that you might be using on your website. We talked about crawl and indexation issues. We touched a little on issues related specifically to domain names and we explored the strategy behind planning the architecture of information found within your website. Let’s continue with part 3, the final piece to the SEO best practice puzzle. KEYWORDS On-page Targeting Carefully choose a keyword to target for each of your web pages. Do not target a keyword simply based on search volume.

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The SEO Road Map to Success (Part 3) – A SEO-News Exclusive Article

Source: SiteProNews Recent Articles

Are you using free media in a manner that brings you sales, leads, and new customers? If not, consider the following for a moment: “When you do the same as other online start-ups: you get the same poor results they are receiving.” Let me restate that fact statistically: 97% of all Sales and Landing pages (existing right now on the Web) fail to make a single sale, or bring in a single “lead.” Sounds horrible right? Is your business one of the 97%? The same applies to Sales emails, lead generation emails, Squeeze pages, Capture pages and other Web applicable media such as Sales videos, lead generation videos, and like content. To get the best result, all promotional content (which you expect to make sales, or generate leads) must be written by a sales writing professional. Why all the “gloom and doom” might you ask? Is it the economy

Taken from source article - 

Webmasters: Get Your Sales and Landing Pages Working For You — A SPN Exclusive Article

Source: SiteProNews Recent Articles

I get the best questions from readers about doing article submissions, and this is one that I’ve received several times from different people. They want to know how to get a consistently high search engine ranking and PageRank for their articles in Google, because they’ve noticed their articles can start off with a high ranking, but then lose traction over time. I’m glad to answer this question, because it gives me the chance to clear up a common misconception with article marketing – that it’s the articles themselves that you’re trying to get a high ranking for. To clarify, what you’re really shooting for is a high ranking for your own website when people search for keywords associated with your site, rather than the articles themselves. The articles are just a tool – you’re using your free reprint articles to get a higher ranking for your website.

Originally posted here: 

How Can I Get a Higher Ranking for My Articles in Google?

Source: SiteProNews Recent Articles

Keyword Optimization… Overlooked Keyword Research and Processes! Keyword optimization, better known as Keyword Research, is the researching, the analyzing, then the choosing of the most suitable keyword phrases for your content. Keyword research and optimization done right will create a funnel of qualified and targeted traffic back to your site from the search engine results pages (SERP’s). Proper keyword optimization is the finding of those targeted and profitable keywords and keyword phrases that your potential visitors will enter into the search engine’s Search box, which will bring up the most relevant sites to a particular subject. This process will play a large role in determining where you will land in the Search Engine Results Pages… it could mean the difference between not being found anywhere on the Web, or being the first site that users click on when performing a search. This keyword optimization procedure is NOT a onetime thing…this is something that needs to be done each and every time you decide you want to bless the World with your brilliance of the written word.

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Keyword Optimization – How to Optimize for Google Search Results!

Source: SiteProNews Recent Articles

I was recently going through a discovery process with a Fortune 500 executive who was guiding his company’s Web site redesign, and I inquired directly about the search aspects of the project. His response: “Search is not relevant to this process.” Contrary to what he was saying, search was in fact critical to the overall process; he was just clearly unaware of his company’s campaign history and investment in the search channel. In light of this response, seemingly old and worn advice is worth another spin or two around the block, especially if it will help convey the natural search value of a legacy Web presence.

In enterprise marketing, it is not a question of whether your company’s site is going to be redesigned or not, it is simply a question of when. Most companies do some kind of major redesign or tweak every two years, and if they haven’t just relaunched, they are planning for the next one. So the “when” is most often “now,” no matter where you are in the process. The important thing to remember here is that search should be a key consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is selecting a provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site deployment.

So how do you fit natural search into the process? Here are a few ideas to start:

Use site language and messaging that is consistent with the user’s perception of your product or service.
For the most part, search engines are still very literal, and truly effective semantic intelligence still lies far ahead. Position content and language that reflects the way users search, in order to rank for those terms. The path to understanding this language is through linguistic and keyword research, and also by studying and knowing your target. Language and keywords impact and guide information architecture and content strategies, among other aspects.

Read your log files (and/or review analytics reports).
If you want to know what you stand to lose in a site redesign, take a look at what you are currently gaining in terms of traffic, visibility, revenue, and conversions. Are there any particular Holy Grail terms like “travel,” “shopping,” or “banking” that may be giving you a lot of traffic? See a section of a site that is referring a ton of long-tail terms? You will likely find some areas that are worth preserving.

Ensure that RIAs are both crawlable and indexable by search engines.
Rich Internet technologies that are implemented without search engines in mind can instantly render a once-thriving natural search program into total obscurity. Flash and Ajax are key tools in the design and development toolbox, but considerations must be made for search upfront.

Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues.
When you change phone numbers, the phone company will leave a recorded message telling the new number to the person who called your old number. This is the effect a 301 permanent redirect has on a search engine — it applies the old URL and backlinks to the new URL; the search engine is happy, and your site is happy. A canonicalization problem occurs when 302 redirects are pointed to permanently moved pages. I have seen instances where clients have gone through four or five redesigns using 302s, and a string of six-to-eight redirects points to a single page, each with its own set of inbound links. This basically makes it difficult for engines to determine the “real URL” to show in results and apply backlinks to. How do you fix it? See the next point.

Set up a redirection plan.
In just about every redesign project, at least some content is removed, and URLs go away. Help the engines and your users by using a 301 redirect to point them to the most similar page on your site, or the site map, home page, or custom 404 page. Spend the time to map out which URLs are going away, and where they should be pointed. And don’t sit on the plan —do it on the day or evening that a site is pushed out of production.

Don’t remove content that supports coveted rankings without assessing risks first.
One mistake I see frequently is when content is removed from a site, with no replacement content to support the valuable rankings and visibility it has previously created. Before axing existing site content, determine how difficult it would be to re-attain the ranking, the ranking’s importance in terms of traffic and revenue, or if it is your CEO’s favorite pet ranking. Then create a plan for bridging new content, or leaving it alone.

Include search as both a business and technical requirement before planning has even started.
If search is not a consideration and priority early on, then it will be 10 times harder and more expensive to try to re-engineer at the end of or after the project.

Ensure that there is a voice for search within the Web site team structure.
Having a search specialist as part of the Web design team (and implementing their recommendations) will do a lot to ensure a healthy transition in the redesign and relaunch process, in addition to the potential for growth. The list above is useless without some subjective strategy behind it. Get experienced search optimization help that is fit to your company’s unique situation, needs and goals, and make it an integral part of the redesign process.

These are just a few considerations to get you started. Feel free to add your own thoughts and considerations for redesign at the Search Insider blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Designing Web Sites For Search Visibility