Twitter Cards for Social Business

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Derek Hanson

Twitter Cards for Social SEO

The social web is ever morphing and SEO with it. Recently, Twitter has allowed users to claim their websites and their content with Twitter Cards. A Twitter Card allows users to add additional functionality to tweets. How do you do it? I’ll show in a minute but for the moment it is through meta data. Yes meta data. Meta data is website markup used behind the scenes on a website. Historically they were primarily used in SEO and eventually search engines began devaluing the content of them because they have become more complex and able to read information better. Now they seem to be making their way back through social media. Now I wouldn’t be surprised that this will in some way impact SEO. So it is worth your time to fill out your meta data and apply for a Twitter card.

Here is what the mark up looks like to get a Twitter Card

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@your twitter handle”> (ours is @emprisemedia so we would include that here)
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@the author on twitter “> ;
<meta name=”twitter:url” content=”http://emprisemedia.com/an-example-of-teh-content-of-this-page” >
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”The Title of the Article”>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”NEWARK – A description of the content that you want to show up.”>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://emprisemedia.com/images/thisimage.jpg” >

Now I must say that I can already see where some SEO’s might go. But in order to really play off this well and to get SEO value of your Twitter card is that you would want your card to match your content. Now if Twitter attributes it to you and allows your content and Google see’s it but notices it doesn’t match is not going to be valued in their search index. I can only imagine that in the future that Twitter will also begin looking at content and the relationship between those tweets.

One note, since I am a big fan of WordPress, Yoast SEO for WordPress makes this really easy to do. So download and install it.

There are other Twitter meta data you can include. To get whole list of it on the Twitter developers page. How have you used this. Do you see significant success in the use of it in your business? If you need help feel free to reach out to us for web help.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

A Guide to Using Photos for Social and SEO

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Derek Hanson

Nothing Says it better than a pictureImages are easy to consume in an 8 second culture. That’s right, 8 seconds. It only takes a second to consume an image which makes it social gold. The fact is that images really should play a major role in your search engine strategy. People like to view art, people, and the world through images.

1.) Name your image files. This is an easy thing to do to add some SEO value to your images and to your social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram. By naming your images on your blog and on social sites you can give your content an explanation of what are in your photos. Since search engines and social sites are blind this can help give social media and search engine sites what the images is about. If you’ve named your images similar to pages and blog posts of your website this gives added benefit to both your social and SEO value of your site. A must in SEO imagery.
Alt tags and title tags are html seo staples. The are short snippets of code that can further explain what an image is about. So providing a description of image when you upload one on your blog or website is a simple and easy way to help your images rank.

2.) Loading times can play a big part in SEO especially if it is between you and your competition. Start by sizing your images to web safe sizes. Photoshop can help reduce the image size so that it isn’t to large to include. Next, define the height and width of an image in your website/blog which tells the browser along with search engines how much space to leave for the image as it loads. This will greatly increase your load times especially if they are web optimized.

3.) If you are going to add text add it so that it is readable. Search engines have an algoithm to track to identify elicite photos which only goes to say that text might be readable as well. Although I can’t guarantee that it does the fact is if they don’t the likely will.

4.) Make it easy for people to share your images. Again, people like to view so if you help provide the share button then more people are likely to share. It is one less hurdle to getting your photos out. Go look at some major eTailers and you will find that they have social features for their images.

5.) Getting great photos. This is hard if you aren’t a photographer or graphic designer. So there are a couple ways to do this not that I can offer you sound legal advise so don’t take this as legal advise. You can ask your friends for photos as long as you know they have photos you can use. Also, buy some photos somewhere. There are subscription based photo sites that allow you to download photographs. Look for creative common licenses that allow you to share pictures taken by other people. Sometimes these are image attribution photos which means you need to credit the photographer when you share the image.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media | Leave a comment

Quick Solution to Social Media Sharing Images

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Derek Hanson

The other day I posted a topic on ThingLink and how it might help conversion. The social media site allows users to add images and add interactivity to the page. In addition, they have easy share buttons for users to post on other sites like Pinterest. One issue I came across was that if I posted a blog on other social media sites that the image actually wouldn’t appear in the search results. This is, in part, is due to the interactive image being hosted off of my website. I am sure that there might be some that have had the same problem. Here is the problem with a simple fix I came up with.

The problem lies in that these social media sites like Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest are all looking for images. ThingLink needs to use a script in order to make the image interactive even though the source code has the image tag in it when you embed the image. So when a social media site goes to grab the image it doesn’t find it. So now you are left with a missing image when you got post it to your social profiles. Here is the solution: Add a background image to the interactive image. Now you have an image as the base so that it isn’t missing.

Here is what it would look like:

<img style="background-image: url('http://www.emprisemedia.com/images/seo-social-marketing-strategy.png');background-repeat:none; src="http://www.emprisemedia.com/..."

Now you have an image that your social media sites can find and post. In short, disaster averted and your sites graphically beautiful again.

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Social Media Company ThingLink Could Help Customers Convert

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Derek Hanson

social-site-that-might-make-you-convert

Since I have worked on several business website I have particular interest in web design and some graphic design. I also am interested in social media and at times gain inspiration from social sharing sites like Pinterest. Using images really has become a popular social media marketing strategy to building followers and creating customers. One social media company I stumbled upon is what I would say is Pinterest on steroids. The site is called ThingLink which allows users to upload images then make them interactive. View “A Basic Strategy to Get Into Search Results” to view one we created. Users have the ability to embed links, information, videos, and even other photos within an image the distribute it to their social networks. This powerful tool can help you create custom content with conversion in mind.

One of the most difficult things in internet marketing is conversion. The ability to get customers to click and buy, finish purchasing, to send an email, or pick up the phone is a huge hurdle to overcome. People are distracted online so converting them brings on a whole new set of problems. That is why there are people who put a lot of time and spend a lot of money to figure out how to make it easier for people to buy. This is called conversion optimization and plays a big part in getting customers to buy.

Using ThingLink for conversion just makes it easy even for small business to get better conversion. I don’t have any numbers to back this up but if you have a photo with elements that allow people to interact with a page should only improve your business. I would venture to say that both time on site should drastically increase along with the click through rate. I would be surprised if it didn’t.

There are several things I like about ThingLink.

  • First it is easy to use. You are able to upload images with a drag and drop. Adding the interactive buttons are simply a click of a button which takes away the technical know how that keeps most people and small businesses from doing.
  • Second, it’s easy to share. Even after creating your image you can easily share to your social profiles or embed in a website.
  • Third ,there is reporting on your images in case you are curious about the performance. Which helps define some social ROI if you were interested or need those numbers.
  • Finally I would note that it is free. There is a paid version if you wanted more detailed statistics about your images.

Although I have only discovered ThingLink today I am a new fan and look forward to see how other companies and people use it. It is also going on my social marketing list of things to use more of. Are you using ThingLink? How have you used or seen it to make your business standout?

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

A Basic Strategy to Get Visibility in Search Results

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Derek Hanson

I played basketball growing up and still enjoy a few pick up games. I’ve also had the privilege of coaching a basketball team. One thing I learned from playing and coaching is that a well prepared team often wins. Playbooks are often created to help teams know the ins and outs and what each person needs to do. Football especially is known for the complex playbooks to the tune of hundreds of plays. Developing strategies to get visibility takes time. Here is a simple tip to building a strategy in getting your business visible in search engines.

Targeting you search strategy can actually be easy. The difficulty really is figuring out what works for your business and creating content worth sharing. First take a look at Google. Google has search funnels that it delivers content across the web. If you consider getting your business in all or as many of these channels as possible it can help you gain valuable traffic.

Web (This can be a variety of content from blogs, images, video) The content that shows up in this search is what Google has determined to be the most relevant search results. The most common item here is the content of your website. Targeting keywords and writing content can help you become more visible in search engines. If you are in a hurry you can also use Adwords to show up in targeted search verticals.

Images Undoubtedly images can drive a lot of traffic. This can be a good place to also target distribution. People like to look at pictures and providing images can help you get attention and even conversion. I had a vinyl wraps client for a time that would get a good amount of visitors because of a particular photograph posted on his website.

Maps is nearly synonymous with local search or Google Places. The column also links into Google Earth with the content that it posts. Claiming your Google Places listing is worth the effort especially if you get visibility within your search results. Another alternative way to get traffic is to use paid ads which would appear in the Maps section.

Shopping allows for products to appear. Specifically this column can support your products if you’ve worked on using their xml service or upload a csv to their site. In order to get in there you need to go to Google’s merchant center which is also known as Google Base. This allows your products to appear in search results under the shopping engine.

Blogs are an obvious place to get your information indexed in. This doesn’t have to be only on your self hosted blog but can also be done through other blogging platforms. The danger is in developing content in multiple places that is identical is that you may lose some of the oomph that comes from a single source. One way to overcome this is by including your Author rel tag on your website so that the search engines know this is your first place of content.

Videos can be an extremely important matter in getting your business listed. Keep in mind that Youtube is the second largest search engine. So distributing and targeting content in the video feed can help you with your results. Don’t forget to add links back to your site and name your source files the titles of your videos for SEO purposes. These can help improve both the visibility of your videos as well as views.

News section can be a hard thing to get. The most difficult thing to do is create news worthy content. By making headlines search friendly and adding content, Google can give you an added boost to your search traffic and as a result convert customers who might be looking for your products or services.

Places is part of the Local Plus which you can register your business through Google+. This distributes also to the Google Maps api as well as Google Earth. Updating this content and keeping it current is part of developing a local search campaign.

Discussions has been often and on with Google. In part because of what types of restrictions social media sites allow the search engine to index content. One thing is certain right now is that it is indexing for groups, forums, and other social sites. Finding places to engage in these areas may take time but can be worth the effort.

By focusing on these channels you can get traffic from both Google and from the other sites you need to engage in to show up in those channels. This is nearly a double win for you. What are some unique ways that you targeted a particular set of results to get search engine ranking?

Posted in Internet Marketing, Local SEO | Leave a comment

The Social List of Ideas to Generate Content and Engage Customers

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Derek Hanson

content-ideas-to-engage-customers

Small business is a battle. A battle to survive, to win, to get customers. In an age where customers are easily distracted, creating engagement can be difficult. As a way to help you, we want give a list of ideas to help your company become a little more social with content ideas. Not every business can fit these ideas into their content creation. But if you are regularly developing content and thinking of ways to engage your customers than this can help you attract customers and improve your search engine rank.

  1. Create a daily list and share it online daily
  2. Ask interesting questions that help your customers get engaged
  3. Answer questions
  4. Share an interesting fact about your company, product, service
  5. Tell important information about company (owners, employees, customers, start, changes, new offerings)
  6. Talk about products that you carry
  7. Create a photo contest with your product that you have
  8. Share photos from your company that you take (preferably weekly or daily)
  9. Share special interests, non profits
  10. Participate in a non profit and get involved
  11. Different uses for products or unknown facts
  12. Create events for people to come and enjoy
  13. Create a poll to find what things people are interested in
  14. Create meetup groups that people can come to
  15. Take some videos of your store, employees, work
  16. Get personal and share what’s happening throughout the day
  17. Create a daily quote for people to think about
  18. Suggest books
  19. Write a blog with industry related content
  20. Highlight specific customers
  21. Ask for reviews of your company
  22. Do a give away
  23. Sponsor events
  24. Distribute information through email
  25. Give jokes
  26. Shoot some videos
  27. Talk about businesses, people, and ideas you like
  28. Post quotes
  29. Provide How-to’s
  30. Creating an App that people might use
  31. Develop a game for customers
  32. Create a white paper for people to download
  33. Offer free downloads of items on your site
  34. Target influential users and offer them something free to try (they might blog about it)

This isn’t the end all in content ideas. I hope to offer other ideas to help you business think a little outside the box. Do you have any ideas that might help customers to engage?

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Developing Personas to Better Market Your Product or Service

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Derek Hanson

personas-for-marketing

Marketing has all kinds of aspects to it like the 4P’s (product, price, place, & promotion). Sometimes as a small business owner you might be faced with tactics of marketing like promotion without a foundation of why you are promoting the way you are. One example is that you see everyone else do it. I knew a carpet cleaner who spent 60k on an phone book ad spend only to see a fraction of the advertising dollars come back. His estimation was a waste of time and money. That is where targeting your customers with personas can help you define your marketing message and promotion. We will take a strategic look at your reason for some tactics by viewing personas.

What is a persona? Google persona and you will find that one definition is: “The aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others.” Taking that definition you may want to start defining your customers with attributes to your brand. Since I have my internet marketing company I might begin by defining these particular attributes by answering some questions.

Defining Your Personas by Personality. Defining who this person is individually is a great step to helping target the customers you are looking for. Often times ad agencies gather some photos give these people a name and begin to dissect the actual personality of each persona.

1) Who are they?
2) What are their habits/interests/hobbies?
3) What are their specific desires, wants, needs?
4) How do they perceive themselves?

Demographics of Personas. This often can help define a person and how to market to them. If you live in Portland as I do there are things that you find normal that others may find strange. If you are trying to target some (not all) you might define a Portlander persona as a hiking tree hugger, organic local consumer, bike everywhere, keep Portland weird touting individual. At least that is how we might be perceived through the lens of Portlandia. Maybe there is some truth to it but that would a persona. Here are some demographic questions that you could answer.
1) Married, children?
2) Where do they live, work?
3) What is the temperature of their location?
4) What do they eat?
5) What is their income?

Product/service specific. On one side this is defining attributes of your product or service that relate to the personas that you have created. Figuring out the specific need that your consumers have can help you better sell to them. In some ways this can help you come up with new features, services, or products. One of my friends likes to do new product usage in part because he gets stuff for his time spent. The researchers though watch his use of it to figure out the pros and cons of the product. In some way they defined a persona and then get them in to test the product. Some questions relating to personas and your product or service.
1) Have they encountered the product?
2) What needs or pain points might this fulfill/satisfy?
3) Are there other options out there that help fulfill this need?
4) How will they buy this?
5) How will they use it?

Using personas can then help you define your method of online marketing such as social media. For instance, if your demographic is male, with no wife or children, enjoys football and outdoor sports and isn’t to interested in fashion than it is a safe bet that your social media marketing wouldn’t be on Pinterest. Or maybe if they are a busy entrepreneur in a busy B2B company then social media on Linkedin might be a little more of an interest.

Personas can help you better market your product or service to your client. It takes time and energy but the practice is worth performing to help identify how to better market to your customers. How have you used personas? What might be some questions you found needing answering that we haven’t included?

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Social Media For Restaurants in 2013

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Derek Hanson

restaurant-social-mediaRestaurants and social media really work well together. People have a need to eat and for many people the like to share it. Who doesn’t like to talk about their favorite food and share that experience with others both at the restaurant and online. We care a lot about what we eat. That is why restaurateurs should care about social.

1) Claim your listing in Google+ for business. The bulk of your business might be The process to open a Google+ page for business is easy but the process will take up to a week since Google sends a verification pin by mail. The benefit is that this shows up in search engines. A well optimized listing should allow you to show up in the top of search results. Having this listing is important as you can share food images, promotions, and important information about your company. Don’t forget that Google is also a review site now which enables people to rate your company.

2) Yelp and Trip Advisor for social media reviews. Although review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor may not necessarily be thought of as social media the fact is that they kind of are. Social media is a medium that allows people to be social. What these companies provide are photos and reviews of user experiences of hotels, tourist destinations, and restaurants. Just spend a little time on the site and you will see that people are busy uploading their thoughts and photos of restaurants and perhaps yours. Other honorable mentions for review social sites are:

3) Twitter for social sharing. Engaging your (potential) customers through social media can help you get exposure and interest in your company. You can even search for users mentioning your area food and give them a discount. Even fast food companies like McDonald’s use it to promote products, ask questions about their food, and give freebies. Now with the new Vine app customers can share their experience in video format.

4) Photo sharing sites like Foodspotting. Photos are important because it helps people eat with their eyes first. How often have you gone out and saw a photo or saw someones dish and inquired about it? My point is providing good quality photos makes sense to help drive interest in your dishes. Places like Foodspotting, recently aqcuired by OpenTable, allows customers to share their favorites and really only caters to positive experiences showing up in their feed. Enabling customers to share their experience will help your customers to find experience some of your brand before trying it out. So let them eat a little.
Flickr
Twitter

5) Videos through social sites like Youtube. Videos give you a great outlet to tell your story. Using a video can help people experience your brand a little more like what is happening in the lobby, at the table, and in the kitchen. By telling the story your customers may be most interested in your location because of the experience. Perhaps your restaurant is fun or romantic and by showing a video you can tell the story that way. Some other video sites.

6) Promotions through social site like Foursquare. Although Google+, Yelp and many review sites have Promotions I mention Foursquare as just another place to share your promotions. Foursquare is becoming more of a local business site with reviews and photo sharing. Just spend a little time and you’ll find that people like to engage their with recently upload photos and reviews of a company. You can provide coupons and promotions to your company.

7) Facebook & Instagram is nearly the given these days. People are addicted to the platform which gives diners the opportunity to share their dinner experience. Create a fan page to help push promotions, menu updates, and exciting events at your location to those most interested. This also allows you to add photos and videos that your customers may be interested in. Instagram also allows brand pages which you can share your restaurant photos with users. Followers are often pushed the information to your business.

8) Social media monitoring of your restaurant for reputation management. Using social media can be powerful but left alone can be disastrous. A show on the Food Network called “Restaurant Impossible” highlights companies that are failing. The common recipe is that their food is poor, environment is bad, and the customer service stinks. Most of the time this could have been stopped earlier by the owner of the restaurant watching for reviews. By watching what people are saying about your company is good tool to gauge how your restaurant is performing. This is part of reputation management which gives you feedback on your company. You often can rectify any negative situations and turn it positive if the customer is reasonable.

Promotion can be ease the time is often what gets most of us. With these tips you should be able to improve your restaurants brand and gain faithful customers. Are there social media things you have done that is a success? What is working for you and what isn’t?

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5 Ways Vine Could Be Used for Social Media Marketing

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Derek Hanson

vineTwitter bought Vine a app used to create short videos. The social media/micro bloggging added the ability to share a short 6 sec video with ease. It is the 140 characters of video sharing. But in this case if you can shoot a 24-30 frames per second then you get a whole lot more characters in a single slice. What is interesting is that many brands have already begun to capture six second slices to promote their brands. Here is some thoughts on where brands will take twitter with social media marketing.

1) The new vine app will help promote brands. Within the short announcement of this we see companies already using the app to promote their company. Urban Outfitters were showing videos of dog which was more about getting attention of the brand than promoting it’s products.

2) Vine will help brands promote products. It is undoubtedly that videos have helped businesses promote their products. The internet removes the tactile part of buying then video is the next best thing. The video sharing of short clips of your product could allow brands to show their products to customers. Couple this with the ease of Twitter’s ability to share the product then we have short six second videos embedded on a product pages. Just one way to help convert customers.

3) Companies are able to share experience. Travel companies, restaurants, and hotels could show unique features of their business in an easy short video. Like products, show casing locations and services allow customers to engage with a brand a little further and experience their company better.

4) Some other thoughts brands might be able to give step-by-step guides for cooking, helping customers share reviews in short 6 second increments, or even create mini episodes. It’s likely the service will expand beyond to six seconds.

5) Vine might help in the future with search engine rank. Twitter already allows Google to index the site and the more use of it’s feature the more likely search engines will index the content. It will more than likely appear in the columns that we see like video. Expect this to be just one more thing to help with reputation management.

Twitter has been useful for brands to promote their company with coupons, discounts, and public announcements. Now with the launch of its recently acquired video sharing app it is likely to broaden the use of companies to promote products, services and experiences. We look forward to seeing how people and brands are using the service.

How are you using Vine for you business? Share with us we would love to know.

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Using Authorship for Conversion & Branding

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Derek Hanson

Microdata also called rich snippets has become a major part of the digital space. One particular formatting is called authorship driven mostly by Google. This actually has been around for some time and is incredibly easy to implement. What authorship gives is a blogger/writer the opportunity to claim the content written by the author. So if a website has the markup as signal the content is attributed by search engine attributes to that individual.

The benefits that comes from authorship help drive traffic and conversion. How this helps is say your article is good but you don’t have the kind of traffic that would necessarily gain links and even social media mentions that a larger more established site or author would. One so called reader takes your content and with little or no mention publishes your content and gains the links and social mentions you had hoped for. With authorship included on your website a search engines may decide that your site was the first to publish and therefore the authority on the subject. You then may have the links and the social media mentions that the content stolen from you. The other benefit is if you have authorship people are more likely to click on your content. As the image shown above you might be more likely to click on that content of you site. This is in some way a part that should be considered in search engine optimization.

If you plan on blogging you should include authorship to help improve the visibility of your content. Here is how to implement Authorship

Authorship is incredibly easy to get. Here is what you need.
1) Create a Google+ page. You want to have a photo of you that will show up in Google search results. (You kids photo is probably not what you want.
2) Claim the blog or content that is yours. You do this by using an email that is domain related and confirming that you have access to that domain with you email. This would be something like yourname[at]domain[.]com

You can also claim the content by adding your Google+ profile on your domain. It looks something like this.
<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Google gives you a step by step guide on how to implement authorship. Read it hear.

So if you plan on blogging to drive traffic then it is important to add authorship. It can help drive traffic to your site and even give links. Give it a try and let us know how it is working for you.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | Leave a comment