This is an especially difficult thing to avoid for businesses, whose difficulty in navigating social media is well-documented. Businesses usually don’t have the luxury of associating a face — and therefore a person — with their tweets. This isn’t a problem that can necessarily been solved, but it can certainly be minimized. Here are three ways to give your business some personality and avoid tweeting like, you know, a business.

Associate real people with your tweets
This might the easiest way to avoid having a business-y Twitter page. Just tell folks who the real people who manage the brand account are. We do that here at CloudTactix by including it in our bio:

U.S. Bank takes it a step further. They direct folks who need service help to a separate handle, @AskUSBank. This service help handle is managed by two women, who are featured in the profile photo and sign each tweet with their initials. This way, the person seeking help will be able to associate both a name and face with the person with whom they’re interacting.

Mix up the format of your tweets
People don’t like seeing the same style of message pop up in their timeline over and over again, so don’t be a robot. Auto-publishing from a blog is fine, but make sure you’re also engaging follower and retweeting and commenting on industry-relevant news. It also goes a long way to throw in a few questions or light-hearted links every once in awhile too.

Don’t over-hashtag or over-promote
I’m listing these two together because they’re problems that often appear together. Keep in mind the fact that social media almost always falls at the top of the sales funnel—you’re familiarizing folks with your brand, not trying to sell them something. Over-hashtagging will make you seem like you’re just on Twitter for sales as opposed to engagement, which is a huge turnoff for followers. Don’t be like these guys:

Never, ever use automatic direct messages
There’s nothing quite as maddening as following a person or brand and receiving one of these. It’s very impersonal, and it really makes followers think less of you. Just say no to auto-DMs like these:

What does your business do to personalize its social media presence?

You’ll find examples of both good and bad designs, complete with Emily’s remarks.

1. The site’s design should enhance navigability.

Good: theidealists.com

“This is an example of really good navigation. It has four of the really important things up top and then in the sub-nav, they basically have two of the main reason people are going to come to the site, About Us and Recent Projects. They have the video right underneath it to explain what they’re all about and how it works. Once you scroll down past what you can see [above the fold], the nav pops up on the top to keep those right on hand, as well as the log-in and the join, which they also want you to keep in mind the whole time you’re on the site.”

Bad: mikeroweworks.com

“The navigation is horrible. For example, if you scroll over the water, it says, “Join the Mike Rowe Works community. Be a part of the discussion.” If I wanted to do that, I would have absolutely no idea that I needed to put my cursor over the water.”

2. Design a mobile version of your site, or optimize it for mobile devices

Good: espn.com mobile

ESPN is actually a really long page for mobile, but it doesn’t really have much of a nav because it doesn’t need one. When you scroll down, it has pretty much anything someone who is trying to access ESPN on their phone would need. It has all of the top stories of the day on the page, it has fantasy info, it has up-to-date scores. And you can also use it to search for a specific team or sport. It’s really clean.

Bad: toppers.com (You’ll have to be using a mobile browser to see what she’s talking about.)

“Toppers’ web page doesn’t even fill the full screen (on mobile devices). When it loads, it fits the whole web page in two thirds of my mobile screen and I have to zoom in to type things. It could be really simple. It could just have listed four blocks: Find A Store, Order, About Us, Menu.’

3. Avoid clutter

Good: oliverspencer.co.uk

“The layout is really simple. It’s a retail store, but instead of cluttering (their products) all onto the home page, they chop it up into sections shown by images. So you can either look for the words you want or for an image instead of digging your eyes through a bunch of clutter.”

Bad: toysrus.com

“There is way too much color, which I think they did because it’s a kid’s site. But kids aren’t necessarily the ones shopping on it. It’s really overpowering and extremely cluttered.”

What elements of design do you look for when hiring someone for design work?

A fellow consultant here at CloudTactix had written a very nice blog post on how to use Quora to generate inbound leads and strengthen brand recognition. He used an image of a person-like figure pondering next to a large question mark. When he inserted the image, he’d used the alternate text “man with blue question mark.” It turns out this last step, adding alternate text to the image, was what drove all the traffic—more than 5,500 views in 10 days, as you can see in the Cloudtactix.com traffic report below.

The alt text, “man with blue question mark,” ranked very highly on Google image searches for “question mark,” “blue question mark,” and “?.” So a good chunk of people making this simple search were directed to our site, boosting our traffic several hundred percent the following week. Now, this wasn’t exactly what you’d call “high-quality traffic,” as the bounce rate for these searchers was probably quite high. But this example illustrates the power of optimizing images for search.

Google search can be difficult to understand, but knowing how to optimize images is something even the most novice webmasters can gain from. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Use descriptive image alt text, captions and titles. Just as my colleague did, enter a keyword-laden description of the image into its alt text field. This makes it much easier for Google and the like to identify exactly what the image is. Using what you entered in the alt text field as a title and in the caption is a good idea, too.
2. Use descriptive filenames for images. Similarly, provide a succinct description of each image in its filename. For example, you’d be better served with “man-with-blue-question-mark.png” than” IMG4881392.png.”
3. Provide context for the image in the page copy. Referring to the image in a descriptive manner near it on the page helps associate it with the text and makes it easier for search engines to figure out what the image is. You’ll notice I did this by referring to the graph above in the paragraph immediately preceding it.
4. Include images in your Sitemap. A Sitemap is a tool that essentially provides an information guide to search engines so it picks up on pages it might otherwise miss. Similarly, you can include image files in this map (or in a separate map of their own) to make sure search engines index all of your images. You can even highlight the images you deem as most important. For a more extensive explanation of Sitemaps and how Google uses them, click here.
5. Only use image file types supported by Google. These include JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, SVG and WebP.

If you’re like most people, you probably picked the vacuum with the stronger reviews. It’s no secret that good reviews and referrals drive business. In fact, a 2010 eMarketer survey revealed consumer reviews are 12 times more trusted than manufacturer descriptions. As a small business, earning strong reviews can make the difference between finishing the year in the red or in the black.

But what if your company provides services, and therefore can’t rely on product reviews? One way to get around this problem and get word out about your company is to publish a case study and make it readily available on your website. A good case study can be an even bigger asset for your company than a review, and it provides another means to create fresh content for your website. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started:

1. Pick the right client. Clients that you’ve worked with for a long time and who have shown a willingness to recommend your business to others in the past make great candidates for case studies. Talk to your sales team to find out which clients fit this mold the best. And if you’re publishing multiple case studies, diversify them to avoid pigeonholing your company and turning off customers who may not think your business is properly aligned with theirs.
2. Conduct an interview. Asking your case study the right questions is a crucial step to any case study. Hubspot’s Lauren Sorenson recommends asking questions from four distinct categories: what problems led the client to working with your company in the first place, what the client experienced while working with your company, the results the client got from working with your company and, of course, why the client would recommend working with your company to others.
3. Create the case study. If you structured your interview well and asked the right questions, the actual writing of the case study should be relatively painless. Follow the same structure you did in the interview, walking the reader through the client’s experience with your company and ending with a strong, quoted recommendation.
4. Make your case study accessible. Feature your case study prominently on your home page and make it easy to find in your website’s navigation. Share it on Twitter, Facebook and any other social media platforms your company uses. You can even include it in informational packets you send out in person or via email to prospective clients. Case studies can do a lot of work for you if you do a bit of work to expose them.

Does your company use case studies? What other ways can case studies help small business owners?

Use your blog to educate readers and show off your company’s expertise.

One of the biggest gaps in understanding we see here at CloudTactix is the very different ways we, as inbound marketers, think about website content and the way some other folks think about it.

The ultimate business goal of content marketing is to create fresh, relevant content that helps Google and other search engines’ web crawlers “understand” your website is a valuable source of information on whatever it is you’re trying to sell. Most people understand this, or they at least understand it’s important to update their site’s content frequently.

But where the disparity lies is not in their knowledge of what fresh content can accomplish for their site, but what value it holds for, you know, the humans who actually read it.

It’s easy to get excited about blogging and go off publishing a 2,000-word manifesto on all the great things about your product or service, but before you do so, ask yourself if anyone will want to read it. Or even better, leave all those details on the product page and reassess the way you think about content.

Instead of focusing on your energy on writing about your product, educate your readers on what makes a good product or service in your industry. Give them checklists and tip sheets to demonstrate your expertise or use your blog to share industry news to show your business is in-the-know when it comes to current events and trends in its field. Stretch this type of content as much as you can.

Put yourself in a potential customer’s shoes and ask yourself what questions they would have about what it is you’re trying to sell them. Why do I need a product or service from your company? What qualities does it have that make it better than the competition? What problems will it solve? One could write 10 different blog posts to answer each of those three questions.

And great content does answer those questions—it serves as an easy-to-use educational tool for learning more about something without burying its readers in jargon and technical details. It helps your search engine rankings too, but that shouldn’t be its only purpose.

What type of questions do your blog posts answer? What other ways do you use fresh website content?

But regardless of your personal experience with social media, there are a few things to keep in mind when deciding how to use it in part of your business’ marketing plan.

1. Adjust your expectations. In most cases, social media sits firmly at the top of the sales funnel. People don’t log into Facebook or check their Twitter feed looking to buy something, so don’t try to use these channels for that purpose. Social media is all about discovering or familiarizing oneself with a brand. You can find and nurture leads with social media, but it’s not a medium for direct sales.
2. Decide when and where to post. If you don’t have time to use all of the social outlets out there (and who does, really?), you’ll need to choose your media. Twitter is great for non-visual marketing and for PR monitoring. Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram are great for visuals (you can even use coupons on Facebook now). Google+ isn’t as hot right now as other platforms, but it’s great for niche marketing and it’s growing steadily.
   You’ll also need to pick a time to schedule your posts. Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella has spent a good chunk of the last two years looking at optimal times to post to social media. His webinar on the subject is available here, but you should also be sure to do some timing-based testing of your own. When people like to interact with your brand? That’s when you should be posting.
3. Analyze. Social media analytics can be tricky because you need to know three things: if web traffic is driving social media, which social medium web traffic it’s coming from and which individual post it’s coming from. You have a couple of options here. You could use UTM tags, which specify the source of social media web traffic right in the URL, or you could purchase a HubSpot subscription and use their analytics without the use of UTM tags.
4. Guide key followers down the sales funnel. Without question, the vast majority of your brand’s social media followers will never be your customers. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t devote resources to figuring out with ones might. Create a database with information on folks who interact with your brand frequently or who you’ve identified as likely customers. Try to move these folks down the sales funnel by targeting them in your posts.

How does your company use social media to attract customers? What ways has social media changed your marketing plan? Let us know in the comments section below.

The mobile web has impacted the way we determine whether or not a website “looks good.”

The internet is all about change. In a span of less than two decades, we’ve seen the inception of the internet, the dot-com bubble and a world wide web dominated by e-commerce (Amazon, eBay, etc.) shift to one dominated by social media (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter). It’s been marked by a low barrier to entry and short-term success, but very few companies have possessed the ability to stick around for the long term.

Now, the web is changing again. Web 2.0, the social web, is giving way to web 3.0 which promises to be run increasingly through mobile devices. This brings me to the question I’ll ponder in this post: how is the mobile revolution affecting website design?

The short answer is a lot. Aside from the obvious effects, like the rise of mobile apps and the need for companies to create a mobile version of their sites, I’ve noticed some subtler ones as well. I’m no design pro myself, but it’s not difficult to see the impact the rise of the mobile web has had on modern web design aesthetics.

Check out web product design company Zurb’s website. Notice the clean, simple layout. Look at the icons—they’re large and inviting, just like those you might see on your iPhone. There’s also a remarkable lack of text — just a few short paragraphs towards the bottom of the page — and ample white space that’s pleasing to the eye.

For an even more dramatic example, take a look at ideapaint.com. The homepage is so compact you can’t even scroll down (at least not in my browser). It includes links to three subpages, one link to a product page and two simple calls-to-action. That’s it. Obviously, it’s easier for Idea Paint to get away with such a design because their product is visually-based, but it’s certainly worth learning from.

It’s a testament to the power of the mobile web that it has affected the way we judge a website’s aesthetics. It also serves as a sign of things to come. If you’re not ready for its rise, it’s time to get on board.

If you’re not using online tools to lead customers to your place of business, you’re missing out on sales.

Consider this scenario: you’re on vacation with your significant other and you want to take your him or her out for dinner. How do you go about finding out which restaurant to go to? Chances are, you’d go online, look up local restaurants and make a selection based on what you discover, right?

In today’s world, getting found via this process is crucially important to small businesses, who risk invisibility if they have little or no online presence. According to Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch, 81% of people ages 18-34 seek out local business info online before venturing out to make a purchase and 69% of people ages 35-59 do the same. That’s a massive amount of potential customers your business is missing out on if your online presence isn’t up to par.

So what can you do make sure it is up to par? Here are some basic strategies to help your business not only get found, but prompt customers to visit your store and buy your products and services:

1. Calls to action. Folks will be more likely to visit your place of business if they’re given every opportunity to do so. Things like online coupons, free or discounted product offers, ”schedule now” appointment features, click-to-call or chat features and even something as simple as directions to your place of business give browsers incentives to visit your place of business.
2. Paid and (especially) local SEO. Paying for Google AdWords is an effective but not essential way to ensure searchers will find your business. More crucial is that your business is listed with search engine local pages like Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local and other local online directories like Yelp and City Search. These listings, complete with a map, provide searchers the basic information they seek and encourage them to visit. Check out our local SEO checklist for more help with listings.
3. Converge online and offline networking efforts. If you give a potential customer your business card, there’s a good chance that will be the end of your contact with them. If you ask them to follow you on Twitter or become your fan on Facebook, they can do so right then and there on their mobile device and they’ll be connected with you for the long term. With social customer relationship management tools like Nimble at your disposable, you’ll have opportunities to convert this relationship into a lead in no time.

How does your business use online tools to bring customers into your store?

If you’ve been ignoring Google+ in your inbound marketing efforts, now may be the time to get on board. Google announced last week it had started converting pages in its local SEO platform, Google Places, to Google+ Local pages. The move coincides with Google+ adding a “Local” tab to its left-hand sidebar.

Google Places was a dominant player in the local SEO world and it certainly demanded the attention of local businesses, trends that will likely continue with its movement to Google+. This means small businesses everywhere need to take steps to learn how to optimize their local listing with Google following the change.

The logical first step is to acquaint yourself with the way Google+ users (and Google searchers) will view your listing in its new home. Users can search for a particular place or browse through categories of places. When they click on a business, they’ll be directed the business’ place page, which displays all of information typical of a local listing (address, contact information, a map, etc.). Search inquiries for a given place will also include anything members of your Google+ circles have posted about it.

An additional feature unique to Google+ Local is a Zagat score displayed prominently on each listing. Zagat asks visitors to rate businesses on a scale of 0-3 in various categories (product, decor, staff) and then aggregates the scores, spitting out an overall ranking for each category on a 30-point scale. Zagat also pulls out highlights from user comments and features cost information on each listing.

If you already had a strong Google Places page, fear not—all the information has already been transferred to your Google+ Local page. Additionally, you can (and should for now, according to Google) make changes to your listing via your Google Places page. In other words, you’ll still need to verify whether or not your Google Places listing needs to show the address for your place of business, among other things.

But will be the new Google+ page, not the Google Places one, that will show up in Google Search and Google Maps results pages. This is the first step in totally transferring Google’s business pages to Google+.

Do you think Google+ Local presents a better platform for small businesses? Will it encourage you to use Google+ more frequently? Let us know in the comments section below.

Puzzled by how to use content to generate leads? Check out our guide to get started!

The idea behind inbound marketing is simple: use your web presence to pull people in rather than traditional advertising to push something out on them. Perhaps nowhere does this ring truer than in content marketing, which is all about identifying what customers want and crafting content that helps them find what they’re looking for. If your company is not consistently generating new content in the form of blog posts, whitepapers or some other media, you’re missing out on an opportunity to generate inbound leads.

Content marketing expert Tony Murdock recently put together a comprehensive guide to content marketing complete with fancy infographics and in-depth instructions over on SEOmoz, which we highly recommend. If you’re looking for a quicker, lighter guide, check out our version after the jump.

1. Identify a goal. Producing content is great and all, but if you’re not doing it with a greater goal in mind, you’re not maximizing its value. Things to consider when forming a goal: who you are trying to attract, what they are looking for, how can you give it to them and, most importantly, how do you turn this process into business.
2. Assemble a team of writers. If you’re a small business owner who wants to make a commitment to content marketing, you’re going to need some help. Let me repeat myself: no matter how ambitious you’re feeling about content production, you cannot do it alone. Churning out blog post after blog post is tedious work that’s easy to put off if you don’t have a team of talented writers (even if they’re outsourced) on a posting schedule.
3. Figure out what you’ll be writing about. When you’re posting fresh content three or more times a week, running out of ideas becomes a problem fairly quickly. Murdock offers two smart solutions. You can use social media to find out what people in your field are talking about and construct timely content based on that or make it a habit to identify problems your customers have and write about that.
4. Create the content. Ideally, you should be writing your content to draw readers in with writing that is both compelling and search engine optimized. Your content should not be an advertisement for your product, but a tool used to draw in customers and to demonstrate your expertise.
5. Maximize your content’s visibility. There are plenty of ways to increase your content’s visibility. Obviously, optimizing your content for search engines is the logical starting point, but you can also use social media (especially by interacting with influential followers, syndicate your blog content with other blogs and offer to guest post.
6. Analyze the success of your content. After you’ve got a large enough sample of content to work with, start measuring its succes. Are you meeting your goals? Are you successfully converting readers to leads to sales? Learn as much as you can and make the necessary adjustments.

So what does this mean for you and your small business? Well, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile navigation, it’s time to get started. Here are some tips, compiled by internet marketing experts in a recent Mashable post.

1. Test your site’s mobile usability. Does your site look good clean on your smartphone? If it doesn’t, get it fixed.
2. Develop a mobile app. If you lack the funds to outsource the creation of an app to a company that specializes in it, you can develop an app on your own with platforms like Conduit Mobile.
3. Use responsive web designs. You can save yourself and your website visitors headaches by employing a web design that automatically adjusts to the size of screen it’s displayed on. That way, users will get a positive website experience no matter which type of device they use.
4. Make sure your images are high-resolution. Until recently, it wasn’t difficult to get away with using low-quality images on your website. Unfortunately, these kind of images look bad on mobile screens, so they’ll have to go.
5. Simplify your site design. Generally, simple and easy-to-navigate websites do much better with mobile devices. If you’re undergoing a site redesign, consider keeping it simple.
6. Don’t bother with flash. Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support flash. If you’re using flash on your website, you’re not reaching your full audience.

What changes has your website undergone to adapt to mobile usage? What changes do you still need to make?

We’ll get to the platforms in a bit, but before you get started on those, here are a few general local SEO guidelines to make sure you’re following across all your listings:

1. Your place-of-business’ name and address should be identical in each listing.
2. Link to a useful page in each listing. Think of the searcher’s perspective and link to a page on your site that helps them find what they’re looking for. This may be your homepage, but it may be some other page entirely, depending on your business.
3. Include keywords in each listings. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to standardize an “about us” section complete with keywords to use in each of your listings.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the listing services themselves. The listings category you’ll want to address first is your major search engine local pages. According to SEOmoz SEO expert Donny Dover, Yahoo Local might be the most important of these for local SEO. Be sure to include photos and check appropriate the appropriate categories (if possible) for your listings in each of the following listings:

1. Yahoo Local
2. Google Places — be sure to check out our post on whether or not you need to remove your brick-and-mortar address from Places.
3. Bing Local

The next step is to register your site with more specific directories like those listed below. You can do this manually, but we recommend using Yext, a CloudTactix partner-service that makes it easy to publish and edit listings all at once. It’s also important to keep in mind that some directories are directed at niche industries, and therefore may not be of use to your company.

1. Yelp
2. CitySearch
3. UrbanSpoon
4. Trip Advisor
5. Yellow Pages
6. Other niche directories

What other ways does your business use local SEO?

By now, most people realize how important search engine optimization is, especially for small businesses. What’s less clear is how exactly to do this. This is a much tougher to identify. As Jonathan Rick wrote in a recent guest post on Mashable, search engine optimization is an ”ever-evolving and much-debated field … full of qualifications and judgment calls.”

In sum, there’s no foolproof set of guidelines for search engine optimization. That said, there are some practices that are without a doubt important. If you’re blogging regularly to build high-quality content (and if you’re not, you should be), it’s essential that your headlines include keywords and are written as straightforward as possible. Unfortunately, this also limits your ability to write catchy or clever headlines.

Rick offers a solution: instead of sacrificing readability for search engine optimization in headline writing, you can use a trick to capitalize on the best of both worlds. He suggests making your article headline clever and catchy and writing a separate, keyword-heavy headline for your page title. Many blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Drupal, offer plug-ins that make it easy to to separate the two. This way, you’ll be able to write compelling headlines without sacrificing search engine optimization.

For example, one of the top stories on the New York Times website today uses the article headline “A Watershed Move, Both Risky and Inevitable.” This is an enticing headline because it invites the reader to click through to the full story to learn exactly what this move is (his endorsement of gay marriage Wednesday). But note the page headline: “Obama’s Watershed Move on Gay Marriage.” The latter headline includes keywords that would likely rank this article highly for someone searching, say, “Obama on gay marriage.”

The (optional) next step is crafting a keyword-rich meta description for your post. Google will do this for you if you don’t, but it’s especially useful if you’re targeting a niche audience.

For other tips on optimizing your content check out our other blog posts on link building and calls-to-action content.

To get the most from your tweets, you must first understand how Twitter works. For an introduction, check out our posts on integrating social media with your overall marketing plan and what not to tweet about. If you already have the basics down (or even if you don’t), you may be interested in the latest findings from Hubspot Twitter expert Dan Zarrella.

Zarrella sought out the best conditions for generating retweets, which are valuable to marketers because they can greatly increase the audience of a given tweet and generate loads more traffic to a website. I’ve summarized his retweet insights below. You can also find them in the post I linked to above.

1. Share lots of content. This one’s a biggie, and it’s just logical: people are more likely to share tweets that link to interesting content, so provide it for them. Zarella found that accounts that link to content in 60% or 80% of their tweets generate the most retweets.
2. Don’t tweet about yourself unless it’s relevant to your audience. This is the one of the things that can really turn people against you. Using your Twitter account as a personal journal (i.e. — “Buying milk at the grocery store,” or “Watching Mad Men before bed!”) is a big no-no if you’re trying to build a marketing audience. People don’t really care about your everyday nuances; they care about getting content that will benefit them in some way. Zarrella found that tweets that contain a self reference are half as likely to be retweeted as tweets that do not.
3. People retweet more frequently as the work week goes on.This one’s pretty self explanatory; see the graph below.

   

   Source: danzarella.com

4. Ask for retweets. Personally, I usually get annoyed by people who ask for retweets. But if you have an urgent or important message to get out, Zarrella’s data indicates asking for a retweet actually does work. Tweets that include “please retweet” generate more than four times as many retweets than those without it, and those that include “please RT” generate more than three times as many.
5. Tweet about Twitter. Believe it or not, people who use Twitter really like talking about Twitter. It’s the one common interest you share with virtually all of your followers. Use it to your advantage.

   

   Source: danzarrella.com

Google Chrome (Photo credit: thms.nl)

As important as search engine rankings are to the inbound marketer, it can be an awfully frustrating thing to keep up with. Any number of things could be causing your search engine rankings to fluctuate and only some of those things are directly in your control.

For example, Search Engine Watch’s Eric Ward compiled a list of a few link building problems that could affect your search engine rankings in a recent blog post. Many of the problems, which I’ve listed below, can happen instantaneously without your immediate knowledge of them happening.

Here’s a list of problems that could be to blame if your site’s ranking is lower than you’d like it to be, complete with tips on how to go about fixing them:

1. Your competitors’ linked content is simply of higher quality than yours. In this case, there’s no easy way to go about fixing the problem. You just need to build better content, attract links to it and seek out links for the content you already have. Consider employing SEO-friendly 404 pages or other creative link building tactics
2. Google changed its algorithm. Google constantly changes the way it indexes and ranks pages. This affects not only where your page ranks among competitors, but how valuable links from other sites, whose devaluation could also hurt your site’s ranking, are.
   If sites that link to yours are devalued, loosen your ties with those sites. If your site is hurt directly by the changes, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this other than try to improve your own content and link building efforts. For more information on how Google ‘works,’ check out our blog post from last week on it.
3. Someone’s cheating. If you or one of your competitors is using questionable linking tactics like spamming or paid-for text links, your ranking will be affected. Fortunately, Google catches on pretty quickly to shady tactics like those, so the boost in ranking is likely to be temporary. If your competitor’s spammy links are ranking it highly, it probably won’t last too long before Google devalues them. If you’re the one employing these strategies, it’s only a matter of time before Google finds out and your ranks take a hit.
4. A site that provided your site with valuable link juice shut down. This is rare, but sometimes sites shut down and unfortunately, they take all of their links with them. Once again, there’s not a whole lot you can do but move on and find other sources of links if this is the case.
5. Someone sabotaged your SEO strategy. I’ve personally never heard of this happening, but Ward says he’s had several clients whose sites were devalued because of spammy links placed on it by someone else. The insight to gain here is to always make sure your site is secure.

Facebook Offers allows small business marketers to create Facebook-only coupons to share on their timelines. Fans of the page can then share these coupons with their friends (even if the friends aren’t fans of the page themselves) and redeem the coupons for discounts or other specials at the business location itself.

Creating a coupon using Offers couldn’t be easier: simply draft a catchy call-to-action for the headline and choose a photo to accompany it. You can also include a “terms and conditions” section if their are special instructions that go along with the coupon, although Facebook doesn’t exactly recommend it.

Below is an example of what an Offer looks like, as shared between two of my personal Facebook friends. It’s important to note that I’m not a fan of this business and the person who the coupon is being shared with may not either, but both of us (along with dozens of other mutual friends) are being exposed to it. That’s some powerful reach, folks.

You can also set a limit on the number of coupons that can be redeemed (or choose to leave it unlimited) and create an expiration date for them. As Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughn points out, sending out a coupon several days in advance of its expiration date can make a coupon even more successful because it gives followers the time to share it with friends.

Any business which categorizes itself under the “Local Businesses and Places” option in the “Basic Information” portion of its page’s settings is eligible to use the Offers page for free. It’s a great way to not only bring people into your place of business, but grow a social media following very quickly.

Image via CrunchBase

Improving your company’s search engine ranking is the crux to inbound marketing. If your page doesn’t rank highly, your chance of getting found and therefore generating business is much lower.

The first step towards improving your inbound results is understanding exactly how Google works. Google’s head software engineer Matt Cutts gave a brief explanation of how Google used to work and how it currently works, including how it crawls the web, indexes pages, ranks them and handles search queries.

You can watch the video in full below, where I’ve also summarized Cutts’ main points.

Google used to crawl the web for a month before taking an additional two weeks to push out the data. Now, it crawls a significant portion of web pages daily, to keep its search results up to date.

“Instead of waiting for everything to finish, you’re incrementally updating your index. And we’ve gotten even better over time. At this point, we can get very, very fresh. Anytime we see updates, we can usually find them very quickly,” Cutts said.

The next step is indexing pages by what words and phrases appear in them.

“The whole process of doing the index is reversing so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words and they have it in document order. So it’s these are all the document the word appears in.”

The toughest part of the process, and probably the most important for inbound marketers, is ranking the pages. Cutts explained that things like word proximity, page reputation and links to it are among the most important factors when ranking pages.

“Once you’ve done what’s called document selection, you try to figure out how should you rank those, and that’s really tricky. We use PageRank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings.”

If your business sells products online, you likely have a lot of expired content and therefore a handful of 404′d pages. This can be troublesome, as 404 pages have the potential to turn visitors away from your site. A viewer who gets a 404 error when perusing your content may be encouraged to close the tab or leave your site altogether.

The traditional 404 error also damages your site’s SEO potential. Google and other search engines have limits on the amount of pages they can crawl on a given site. If you have pages that redirect to a 404, you’re wasting your crawl allowance.

Thankfully, Stephanie Chang over at SEOmoz put together a detailed guide on how to effectively deal with expired content. While the guide is worth checking out, I’ve summarized three options for dealing with expired content below:

1. Create a custom 404 Page. If your site uses 404 error pages, make them useful. Link the 404 pages to pages related to what visitors were trying to find when they got 404′d. Doing so can boost your keyword rankings and help you avoid losing visitors who may otherwise leave the site.
2. Create a 301 Permanent Direct. Chang recommends 301 redirecting expired content to a relevant page because it helps retain the external link equity built up in the expired content. The only problem with this strategy is that it can be difficult to find an appropriate page to redirect to. Generally, try to redirect to a page that won’t expire and that falls under the same category as the page you’re redirecting from.
3. Leave the page as it is. Sometimes, content on a page that has expired can still be valuable. You may be better off leaving this page active, with a message noting the reason for its irrelevance. For example, if a popular but out-of-stock product is still generating visits, you can leave it up with a message saying the product is out of stock and then link visitors to similar alternatives. However, Chang cautions against overusing this method because like 404′s, these pages count towards your search engine crawl limit.

How does your business deal with expired content? Share your insights with us below.

Image via CrunchBase

Social media is a fantastic way to deliver web content and to keep in touch with customers, but it can also serve as a valuable tool for finding new customers. Depending on your business or industry, there are many ways to find and reach out to potential customers via social media channels. Here are a few basic guidelines for finding customers using social media:

Use Twitter’s search and advanced search functions to find folks that are talking about your business. Even if searching your company’s name doesn’t reveal much, you can search for keywords that describe your goods or services. For example, if you own a bakery in Milwaukee, you could search for tweets containing “cookies Milwaukee” or “donuts Milwaukee.”

Make frequent use of image-based posts. Facebook statistics indicate that image-based posts drive twice as much engagement as text-based posts. When your followers share or like your images, it shows up on their friends’ timelines. This exposure can grow your social media audience and widen your potential customer base.

Use contests to boost engagement. People love free stuff. What better way to get folks talking about your company than to run a social media contest for free products and discounts? Not only will people be engaging with your company, they’ll also want to learn more about the cool products they can win, which can help generate sales.

Post different content to different social mediums. Obviously, you should be posting your website content on all of your social media pages, but it’s important to post unique content to each channel. Many companies now use a social media tool like Nimble to post to all of their pages at once, but customers won’t care to follow multiple accounts if they’re being fed the same content over and over again.

Personally engage followers. One of the biggest challenges for companies regarding social media is engaging effectively with customers. You need to humanize your brand on social media channels and personally engage followers in order to bridge this gap.

How are you using social media to find customers?

Despite the fact that social media has taken the Internet by storm over the last couple years, not all social platforms are created equal. For example, anyone who has spent time online could tell you about the overwhelming presence of Facebook. Because Facebook has a user base approaching one billion, if you’re not making it easy for users to share your articles on Facebook, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for driving traffic to your site.

Other social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn have also established a strong presence on the web, especially in niche communities. Even newcomer Pinterest, which grew at unprecedented rates in late 2011 and early 2012, has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in the social media world.

But where does that leave Google+, which was heralded as the latest and greatest social networking tool before its launch a little over nine months ago? Despite the initial hype, Google+ has thus far failed to match growth rates seen by Pinterest and Twitter and has thus fallen victim to the widespread perception that no one really uses Google+. Evidentially, even the creators Google+ addressed this perception in a blog post a few months ago.

But despite the negative perception and the “crowded” (I’ll get to this in a moment) social media webspace, Google+ is, in fact, posting steady growth numbers. Most recently, it posted a healthy 27% increase in visitors from February to March.

As for the idea that the social media world is just too crowded for another Facebook or Twitter-esque giant, look no further than social media’s latest flavor of the week: Pinterest. Even though plenty of other platforms existed for sharing images (Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Imgur, for example), Pinterest broke onto the scene late in 2011 and is now the third most popular social network in the United States.

The lesson here is that even though there are plenty of social media sites out there, it’s as good a time as ever to grow a new network. With its encouraging March numbers and early signs that Pinterest’s explosive growth is stagnating, Google+ isn’t out of the race just yet.

Put on your hard hats, it’s time for Website Construction 101.

If you’re engaged in inbound marketing efforts, a properly constructed website can make the difference between generating quality leads and turning customers away. While your individual website needs may vary depending on what you’re trying to do with your site, there are a few basic DOs and DON’Ts that every business should adhere to when it comes to constructing a website:

DO have a blog and update it regularly. Not only does blogging create valuable content and backlinks to boost your SEO rankings, but it also gives visitors a more in-depth look at what your company actually does and the unique way that you deliver your goods and services.

DO NOT overuse auto-play media or pop-up ads. When you’re visiting a website, the last thing you want to do is scramble to close pop-up ads or search for the pause button to silence the music or video that starts playing when you enter the site. A lot of folks will simply hit the back button or close a tab to avoid dealing with these annoyances.

DO include social media buttons wherever appropriate. Social media is arguably the most important aspect of marketing for a business that is promoting itself online. Provide your customers with an easy way to connect with your business and help promote your brand by embedding buttons for Facebook, Twitter and other social networks within the content of your site.

DO NOT write jargon-filled copy. It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing about your business in a way that makes sense to you, but doing so risks sounding unintelligible to people who aren’t also experts in your industry. To avoid turning customers away, always keep a potential customer’s perspective in mind when writing copy for your site.

DO include clear and appealing calls-to-action. If you’re offering a promotion or discount, direct visitors to it directly so they don’t have to search for the promotion. Remember: Internet users need to be told what to do. Make it perfectly clear what you’re offering. Nothing turns a potential customer away than failing to give them what they’ve been promised.

DO NOT get caught up in loading your copy with SEO-driven keywords. As important as it is to drive search traffic with optimized copy, your content still needs to be compelling. If you’re writing first and foremost to include keywords, you risk turning customers away by showing them you’re more focused on promoting your product than you are on their loyalty and satisfaction.

Have these DOs and DON’Ts worked for you? What have you added to your inbound marketing DOs and DON’Ts list?

While social media is often hailed as a game-changer for marketers and small businesses, because it’s such a new phenomenon, there’s still a lot of confusion out there in regards to how small businesses should fit social media in to their overall marketing strategy.

One of the smartest ways I’ve seen this question answered came in a recent blog post by Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch, who suggests viewing social media as a layer in your overall marketing strategy that makes it easier to do what you already do in other marketing efforts. This is good advice because any business can make use of this line of thinking.

Here are some tips to get yourself in the layering mindset and to integrate your social activities with other inbound efforts:

1. Convert social followers to email contacts. Email addresses are far more valuable to the inbound marketer than social media followers. Direct followers to content that will encourage them to join email lists.
2. Go fishing for referrals. One of social media’s greatest assets is its unique ability to reach a massive audience with very little investment. As Jantsch points out, even if someone isn’t a valuable customer because they don’t do a lot of business with you, they can still be very valuable as a social media follower if they are referring your business to others.
3. Build your customer profile. The connections you make via social media can tell you a lot about what kind of people make use of your business. This type of information can be valuable in all kinds of marketing efforts.
4. Strengthen your content’s SEO. Social networks provide a great platform for sharing links and and discussing blog content. These inbound links are held in high regard by search engines, so coupling good content with smart social media practices could vastly improve your content’s SEO.
5. Get press. As a journalism student myself, I’m all too familiar with the degree to which today’s journalists rely on Twitter and other social networks to keep up with news stories in real time. Boost your public relations strategy by targeting journalists with social media.

How do you integrate your social media with other inbound marketing efforts?