If you haven’t seen this yet, you must:

We’ve always been slightly suspicious of formal public relations efforts. It works for lots of companies but in a social networking world public relations has a harder job remaining credible and authentic. We’ve been working on our own ideas and learning from our friends at Grasshopper to build a simple sales-orientated buzz process.

Although still in a state of refinement here is the process and some specific tasks associated with each step. Keep in mind this specific checklist is in context of creating buzz for Fresh Tilled Soil so the relevant audience targets would be exchanged for each appropriate client should we go that route:

Buzz Process Checklist:

1. Read through the list of design blogs that are looking for contributions and add each one to a spreadsheet (use Google docs if you can so we can all have access to it and make edits if necessary) Read more

How is Twitter becoming more and more relevant to SEO and internet marketing strategies today?

Let’s talk business strategy for a minute…

First off, and most obviously, there has been an overwhelming public interest and participation in online social media networks in the past few years (Twitter, in particular;) microblogging is arguably the newest phenomenon in high tech communication.   Commercial industries must and will cater their marketing strategies accordingly.  Every notable business today has a Twitter account you can follow, right?

Proof’s in the Pudding

Google has altered its indexing algorithms based on real time conversations as a result of Twitter’s growing influence on consumer opinion and product branding.   Since the public has a voice through these social media venues, marketing is becoming more and more tailored according to consumer wants, likes, and dislikes.  Google, too, has noted this gradual shift, and developed its real time and personalized search features as a means of specifying search results.  Services like Yelp, that allow users to give their personal input on a product or service, centrally locate businesses in online search results; public preference plays a key role in how Google optimizes site rank.

Google’s recently released caffeine update will further increase the value of link sharing and traffic building through social media venues like Twitter and Facebook.  Google Caffeine speeds up the search engine indexing process, allowing pages to be indexed more quickly; the caffeine update has essentially made “real time” search results possible.

Real time search results index live Twitter feeds at the top of Google search engine results pages.  Twitter makes “real time” link building possible—this is a quick and easy way to get a site ranked on the first page of Google.

Finally, expert predictions regarding what will be the most effective SEO strategies in the upcoming year all point to the incorporation of social media as a key.  Getting genuine incoming links from quality, relevant sites will get you the most “bang for your buck” in terms of link juice and effective search engine optimization; link building on blogs is becoming less and less worthwhile and effective because so many comment forums now have “nofollow” tags on guest post hyperlinks.

Love it or hate it, it looks like you might want to start embracing Twitter– if only for the sake of your business.

The useful-ness of Twitter has been a much debated, controversial subject.

Twitter is most common criticized for being a waste of time.  I won’t deny it–there’s definitely some legitimacy to this statement.  Without a set agenda, Twitter probably won’t be a very good use of your time. However, the secret to using Twitter as a very useful business tool is to develop and stick to an agenda.  Decide what you want to achieve, and develop a game plan of how to do it.  Stick to your purpose, and Twitter will prove to be a crucial resource for the success of your business.

There are a lot of very that are tweeting about relevant, useful content every day.  This microblogging site allows users with similar interests to connect with one another.

I discovered an flock of interesting, knowledgeable, and yes, even influential, people in the internet marketing industry via Twitter; this microblogging site connects individuals with similar interests and puts them in direct contact with one another. What better news source is there than the real time conversations of industry professionals, especially in a society where business fundamentals increasingly cater to public opinion? Twitter is an amazing resource for staying tuned-in to the most current public dialogue around the world, even pertaining to niche industries.

For me, Twitter became a tool that helped me build links and traffic to our website—key aspects of search engine optimization.  I opened lines of communication, became a guest blogger on other’s sites, and contributed my own interesting and informative tweets.  Making business contacts, earning viral attention, building your brand, receiving consumer feedback, and accessing cutting edge industry information are all inherent values of Twitter, if used correctly.

We often get a lot of questions from clients referring to title, description and keyword tags and what the “best” practice is when creating such tags. The rules are fairly simple, but the process is not.

I always recommend a title tag that incorporates relevant keywords, phrases and a description of the company or page you are creating the title tag for. Title tags have a limit of about 60 characters. When it comes to the description tag, again you want to outline and give a “description” of the page you are outlining, using keyword rich content, with a limit of about 160 characters.

The rules are straight forward and simple, but actually developing title and description tags that are effective in terms of SEO can be another story. Often times I have to do a lot of homework involving keyword research to determine keyword search volume, the type of keywords the client wants to rank for and tags that are clearly positioned which outline the content found on the specific page they are being optimized for.

Time and time again after creating title and description tags clients do ask, “why didn’t you optimize or create keyword tags?” and I continue to answer, “because keyword tags are no longer relevant and don’t help with your ranking potential.” Still don’t believe me… take it from Matt Cutts: a Google Software Engineer.

I’ve been reading a lot of juicy articles over the past couple of weeks pertaining to Google’s futuristic ability to display “real-time” search results AND today I’ve finally seen this mighty-magical process in action.

Let’s start from the beginning… every now and again in an enchanted little place called, “my desk” I like to check to see that my Twitter profile is ranking correctly. Today I typed my Twitter username into the Google search bar and was pleasantly surprised to see “real-time” search results stemming from my Twitter username (review my lovely screen shot below). I was filled with joy… yes, joy over real-time search results!

Then I began to think of all the ways we can harness this power to help increase our clients organic search results. I’m sure over time, more and more Google searches will incorporate this feature into the functional elements of Google’s search. But one questioned really stood out to me. Why do some search results display real-time search and others don’t? It’s really all about social presence or the amount of “social content” related to the keyword iteration you type into Google and how frequently you update that content. If there are a lot of Tweets and other social elements that relate to a particular keyword then the ability to view “real-time” search is probably more likely.

Again, this is completely new to me but I cannot wait to see what direction this takes us in search. It’s a great time to build-up your online social marketing skills, because there definitely seems to be a new direction of search on the horizon.

If you are an online marketer then you have probably heard of hubspot.com. If you haven’t, then jump on over to their website right now and read up about them. Among it’s various online marketing tools, Hubspot has developed a website grader tool (http://grader.com), allowing individuals to examine the strength of their website from a quality score and detailed report.

I am happy to announce that as of today www.freshtilledsoil.com’s current website grader score is 99.7. What does this mean in terms of SEO?… well, a lot. Much of the website grader score is based on the marketing effectiveness of your site. Out of 1,655,774 websites that have been ranked thus far, freshtilledsoil.com ranks in position # 5,795 and scores 99.7 percent higher than the other sites evaluated.

It’s entirely important to focus both on your off-site and on-site marketing and SEO efforts to help increase the web presence and popularity of your site. In turn, you will be able to increase your overall traffic and the amount of potential leads you receive.

Ok, content may not be King per-say, since there are so many other factors that affect your overall SEO effectiveness, but it’s right up there in terms of importance. It’s not only about the content really, but how you use your content to gain SEO strength within the search engines.

I’ve always found article submission websites to be a great way to promote yourself or your company online. From a human element, the trick is to offer your viewers valuable information, which with help increase the popularity of your article. The next element is to be subtle when you mention or link to your site, unless of course your are explaining the purpose of your organization. From a search engine perspective, article submission sites are highly relevant since the content is always being updated. Many of these sites allow you to hyperlink to your website within the article, which essentially helps drive traffic to your site.

We have been working with an online process equipment vendor, Equipment Genius. We have been focusing our off-site SEO efforts on content creation. I’ve submitted one our articles to an online article submission website, docstoc.com. In a little over two weeks the article written for EquipmentGenius.com is already ranking in Google on page 1, position #4 (check out the screenshot below) for the keyword iteration “online process equipment.” Google has quickly indexed and placed a higher relevancy on this article than it has for the EquipmentGenius.com website. So if you ask me, content is definitely something to use within your SEO efforts.

(Another reason to love Campaign Monitor)

This morning we discovered just how powerful and flexible the Campaign Monitor Template system is for enabling clients to craft and send their own Newsletter or Email Campaigns through the system. Using their proprietary Template Tags, you can customize virtually any section of an Email Campaign template you want while making higher level elements such as the overall structure, branding and footer elements locked through the system.

Here’s an example of a template that’s fully editable by a client in our system:

Everything you see from beneath the logo to the Salutation is editable, including the hyperlinked image in the right column.

Here are a few helpful tips on how we created it:

The Main Newsletter Title:

The main title is simply a Heading 1 Tag with the following inside of it:

<$title link=’true’ default=’Enter Title Here’>

Repeating Content Blocks:

In Campaign Monitor, content blocks consist of a Repeater element with other elements nested within such as headings, images and paragraphs. In this case, we have a Heading 2 tag, a Paragraph beneath it. In other templates, we’ve included the ability to float an image to the right of the paragraph. In this case, we’ve inserted a “Clearing” div above each repeated block so that every content block you add clears the right-aligned image and starts underneath it.

Here’s some sample code:

<repeater>
<h2><$title link=’true’ default=’Enter Body Content Title’$></h2>
<$description default=’Enter Body Content’$>
</repeater>

The coolest thing about these proprietary tags is that the tags that say ‘Enter Body Content Title’ or ‘Enter Body Content’ can be changed to anything you want so the more you extend the template for clients to work with, the more you can guide them by customizing the headings they see when inputting their content.

Single Images:

The most basic form of allowing a client to upload an image is simply to use this tag:

<img src=”<$imagesrc link=’true’$>”>

Now, in the event you wanted to lock the width, apply a border, align it or margin it, you can add on parameters to the image tag like so:

<img src=”<$imagesrc link=’true’$>” width=”200″ align=”right” border=”0″ style=”margin:10px;”>

Once you start playing with these tags inside of Campaign Monitor, it becomes clear that you have access to a great deal of flexibility for custom templates.

View a full list of Campaign Monitor Template Tags.

There are a few golden rules to creating a successful social network around your business, product or movement. Using a collection of best practice ideas and success stories, including the Obama Presidential and Zappo’s campaign strategies, I have created a list of activities and ideas that will drive the creation and ongoing growth of your social network. Here are the key elements.

1. If you are trying to reach a consumer audience then building big databases of customers is essential. Big doesn’t always mean better and it’s easy to get distracted by the numbers. Quality of the group is essential too.
2. Know everything about your audience. Ask them to share their ideas, feelings, doubts, suggestions and comments on the things that you do. Sites like QuickSprout, Signal vs Noise and Mint.com are great at starting conversations that leave a trail of new ideas and insights for the blog or network owners.
3. Connect online and offline events as if they belonged to the same network. Having only an online presence is not enough. You need to link the virtual networks with the real networks and bring those worlds together in any way you can.
4. Build channels to capture data everywhere. Twitter is a great example of a ‘listening tool’ that helps you gather information on your audiences activities. Facebook and FriendFeed are other good ways to listen in on your audience and even start new discussions.
5. Within every network, virtual and real, are activists, evangelists and mavens. Identify them, communicate with them if possible and figure out how to inspire and excite them.
6. Connect the members together in as many ways as possible. In smaller networks create opportunities for the members to communicate and meet face-to-face. In larger networks give them ways to organize themselves and find like-minded members. Organize events or small parties that help customers meet each other and strengthen bonds with your brand or movement.
7. It’s important to remember that there are already lots of membership groups. Find them and give them the tools to connect. Empower them in the places and spaces where they are already connected and spending time. In many cases you won’t need to create your own networks or groups.
8. Give them something to do by organizing activities and purpose for the groups. Don’t leave things to chance or they might become orientated around ideas and activities that don’t align with your positioning.