Measuring ROI for Social Media is a real challenge. Various factors that follow the following ROI equation:

ROI= [(Amount Gained from Investment – Cost of Investment)/Cost of Investment] x 100

Business Social engagement, the process of engaging users to convert them to customers involves numerous activities, including befriending, following, liking various social channels, including posting, comments, emails, invitations, etc. It is hard to quantify all these aspects of social media over a large breadth of social channels (facebook, twitter, youtube, flicker, etc). Facebook has a useful tool to help you quantify your business page’s impact in this social circle called insights (http://www.facebook.com/insights/?sk=po_)

There are many variable that can effect the performance of any online marketing campaign, including social media ones. Having a solid website with good traffic (good content and SEO), easy to use navigation (good usability and low bounce rates), web forms (with tracking and easy to use/fill out), and other basic web aspects.

There are specific things your can do to help your quantification, which is simply applying advanced SEO practices applied to specific social channels. Choose a social channel, like twitter, decide on what message/theme/promotion your are going to use this channel for and create a specific landing page catered to this message and a conversion goal (acquire an email, sell a product/service, subscribe to a blog, etc). Every time you tweet your a variation of your message, include the landing page’s URL (usually in shortened form). Track the traffic going to this specific URL and the resultant page (thank you page, etc). There are several free tools to do this, Google Analytics is one. Plan and run this campaign for an extended period (2 to 4 weeks at least) to get enough data on it’s performance. Granted, you have to have a good flow of traffic going to your channels for this to be effective. Measure and quantify the conversions compared to your time creating the tweet messages, landing page, and other setup costs, then apply these numbers into your ROI equation. One of our recent clients had this ROI for a similar facebook campaign WebPaws.com ran for them (includes messages, landing page and analytics):

ROI = [($7,350 – $2,000)/$2,000] x 100 = 276%

What is gained by implementing a social media campaign? Using the big picture, look at increased sales, customers, visits, brand recognition, quotes, opportunity creation, new customers, etc. as what may have been gained. These can be measured indirectly by setting up a timeline of one or several metrics (revenue, new customers, visitors, etc) from the time you started to use social media in your marketing efforts; include several months prior and several months after your social media implementation. Then map onto this timeline the various social media activities in which you’ve been participating, as well as the results that your company has experienced since implementing its social media strategy. This will show the overall impact social media has had, and whether or not it has helped you increase your goals over the baseline. Contact WebPaws.com for more help or information on getting your social media channels working for your business.

ROI in Social Media

The ROI of Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Google has been leading Search Engine Optimization for the past decade and what better place to get advice on Internet Marketing then from Google. Below we have compiled 6 great online assets from Google that will aid your efforts in getting better web page rankings.

Asset 1: Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Google outlines what it looks for in quality built websites in it its Webmaster Guidelines: “Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.”
There are:
• Design and Content Guidelines
• Technical Guidelines
• Quality Guidelines

These guidelines are an accumulation of experiences gained by Google in improving their search result algorithm to provide users with the best possible results based on their query.

Asset 2: Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google including how Google views your site, share information about your web pages with Google using Sitemaps, lets you set GeoTargeting for your website so it will show up in the relevant GeoTargeted searches. There are lot’s of other helpful tools in Google Webmaster Tools (such as discovering your link and query traffic), so if you haven’t signed up for Webmaster Tools yet, make it a priority.

Asset 3: Google’s Very Own Guide To SEO
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is really SEO 101. It goes through:
• SEO Basics
• Improving Site Structure
• Optimizing Content
• Dealing With Crawlers
• SEO For Mobile Phones
• Promotions and Analysis

This guide uses examples, illustrations and is really a must read for anyone looking to improve their website’s organic ranking in Google.

Asset 4: Matt Cutts’ Blog
Matt Cutts’ Blog on Gadgets, Google, and SEO helps keep you up-to-date on search quality, webspam and SEO from a Google perspective as he is the head of Google’s Webspam team.

Asset 5: Google Adwords Keyword Tool
While the AdWords Keyword Tool is primarily for Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) platform. We can use the data from it to find Global & Local Monthly Search Data and Traffic Estimator which can be very helpful in deciding what keywords you may wish to target in your SEO Plan.

Asset 6: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an enterprise-class web analytics solution that provides rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. You need to sign-up and then install Google Analytics into your website

6 valuable Internet Marketing assets provided by Google that can help your website get better search rankings typically leading to more traffic. If you know of or use any other resources from Google or other source please share by leaving a comment below. If you need help integrating any of these SEO techniques into your website, WebPaws.com would be happy to help! Just Send WebPaws a note.

6 Ways Google Improves Internet Marketing for Your Website is a post from: WebPaws.com

You have a web presence, but it is not providing the activity you expected? This article assumes you have created or have a website that is made to W3C standards, has good semantic structuring, built in on-site SEO and the content is relevant, unique and useful to the page and site as a whole. We are also assuming that you have an easy way for a visitor to give you their information or place an order. With all these features, designs, functionalities in place, then not getting the activity you expected is dependent on your network reach. Adding social media to your site, having external social sites, such as twitter and facebook are crucial to reaching out and being accepted into the social community. Depending on your business, having a flicker account (images) and youtube account (videos) may help in propagating your message and presence to the internet community.

Your standard web presence is just not enough. You need to have a social presence that makes sense to your business. Creating and integrating these sites together will help accomplish broadening your reach and increasing your overall web presence. Maintaining these networks can be tedious, time consuming and repetitive. This is where planning comes to play, you can tie several sites together, your WordPress, LinkedIn and facebook accounts can create twitter tweets for activity or posts and vice-versa. Feedback loops and careful integration make it fun to traverse the social web.

WebPaws.com has plans to maintain your social accounts, add relevant content with backlinks and promotions or offers to entice your various social audiences to look at your main site or other social sites. We also provide interaction services, interacting with your friends, responding to requests and opening relevant and synergistic dialogs to provide grounds of attracting the right kind of followers. Followers that end up as customers or clients.

Call or email us for more info on managing your social networks or integrating social media into your mainstream website to broaden your reach and appeal to your customers/clients.

Maintaining Your Web Presence is a post from: WebPaws.com

When trying to find information on the internet, you typically go to a search engine. When using the most popular search engine, Google, a user enters a query, Google’s machines search their index for matching pages and return the results that are the most relevant to the user. Google determines relevancy by over 200 factors, one of critical factors is the PageRank (PR) for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In more detail, PR can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web, i.e., that sums up all backlinks and their associated ranking weight. We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations)[1]. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this article.

In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other [black-hat] practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. It is not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of backlinks that help you rank better in Search Engines. Having backlinks from unrelated or “bad” sites can actually penalize your ranking. Also a 1,000 poor quality backlinks may have less weight than 1 high quality backlink. Quality is very important in creating your backlinks.

How to determine a quality backlink?

A quality backlink will have these characteristics:

1. The theme of the backlinking website is similar to your website or web page
2. The backlink’s anchor text has the keyword or keyphrase that you are optimizing for
3. The backlinking webpage has a Google PageRank (important for Google SEO) of 1 or higher (the higher the better)
4. The backlinking webpage has few outgoing links, the fewer the better (see above equation as to why)

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. WebPaws.com uses Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and white-hat techniques using some of the best practices that can help your website avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

PageRank: How to Rank Well with Google is a post from: WebPaws.com

To achieve a top listing with a search engine’s result page for a specific keyword or phrase for a specific web page or website, you need to analyze the structure of that page. The term “content is king” applies to some extent, but how the content is built, the structure of the XHTML is really important in making the content index to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Consider the behavior of a person reading a newspaper. Not all pages will be looked at in any detail, scanning headlines, key areas that stand out on a page or keywords of interest is what the reader will hone into. A web page is no different. Not only do you have to have good, original, relevant to the topic (key words), but you must "type-set" that content into a logical format that is easy to understand quickly. Once the reader is "hooked", more details within the article, info should be available either in finer print, links, images, or other relevant media for a web page to pull and keep the reader active.

This is where semantic structure of the page and content is very important. With the advent of mobile technology, page structure is even more important for a wider range of users to access your information. One tool by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has this semantic extraction tool to help you analyze your page’s semantic structure. Firefox has several add-ons that allow you to view a web pages semantic structure, usually based on the XHTML header tags <h1></h1>...<h6></h6>, <p></p> and other structural elements.

SEO best practices start at the foundation of a page and the semantic structure plays an important role along with good content, properly placed keywords, meta data, links, relevant media, XHTML element placement, usage and fine-tuning with their corresponding attributes.

SEO semantics: The foundation for top SERPs is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 5 – Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Top Social Media Websites

The below list represents the top 25 Social Media Websites in the world sorted by Alexa ranking which roughly represents the popularity of website for the last quarter of 2009. Google PageRank is also listed for weighting of popularity.

Top 25 Social Media Websites is a post from: WebPaws.com

Selling your products on the internet requires many factors to produce desired results:  such as great products, a good business model, supporting customer service, etc, but the key at the page level is providing very good communication about the  product.  Product descriptions should  inform, persuade and lead your customers to a sales transaction, which make them very powerful selling tools.  Listed below are several suggestions to increasing the time on page and time on site via well crafted product descriptions.

1. Educate: Educating your customers about your products provides additional value while you are teaching them how this product can improve their life, work, etc.  RadioShack does a good job of this with their Research library.
2. Use Persuasive Emotional Imagery: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind.  Understanding some basic psychology will help you in crafting your copy to show/describe what is important to the user (your targeted audience) to aid in persuading them to choose your product over your competitors products or even the same product but described differently.
3. Include a Call-to-Action: Don’t forget to add a call-to-action in your product description copy.  It is one thing to talk about your product, show great images, talk about its practicality, usage, benefits, etc. but if there is no way for the visitor (potential customer) to go the next step, you have failed in your endeavors to sell your product.  Put an action button such as “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” near the image or main product title.  You can also include a “Send me More Information” or “Call for More Information” link to
4. Focus on benefits, not just features: It is frustrating to listen to a salesperson rattling off useless specifications and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand.  Focus on the unique benefits of your product. Instead of saying “This radio has over 100 presets” you can show the benefit that this radio can hold All of your favorite channels in memory. Another example, instead of saying “This handheld has blue tooth technology”, say that this handheld allows wireless updates, syncing and hands free usage.  Features are important, but should not be the focus, putting them in a table at the bottom of the page or in a separate page linked in the main product page can be a good idea.  Also allowing potential customers to compare features of similar items is a useful tool to helping the customer make a good choice.
5. Proofread Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
6. Use Customer Reviews: Allow your customers to describe or review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
7. Brevity is Good: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description.  Using a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information will lighten the page, keeping focus on the crafted message of images key text and other key product describers.
8. Interactive Visual: Adding a product video or flash presentation will add a new dimension to the users experience, if done well, may enhance the customer’s understanding and interest of the product to help encourage a positive choice for purchase.  The video should show the product in use by a user highlighting it’s unique benefits, enticing the viewer to want this product because of its uniqueness in functions/benefits/features/productivity/time savings/etc.

Using most or all of these techniques will help to retain the customer on your product page a little longer.  This not only increases the Time on Page statistic but also the amount of information the customer is taking in on the product page which increases the likelihood of a sale, our ultimate goal.

Increase Time on Page & Site for Product Descriptions is a post from: WebPaws.com

Anchor Text: the meat of links, the nervous system of the Web

Anchor text is the visible text that is anchored to a hyperlink (web link on a web page).  This is important because the internets primary purpose is to display pages and link them to other pages of relevant content to enhance your browsing experience.  There are many kinds of links, but the primary static text/image linked links are the most common and found on most every web page on the internet.  Further examination of links in XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) of a hyperlink code may look like this:

CODE:
<a href="http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/">WebPaws.com&rsquo;s Internet Marketing Services</a>

HOW YOUR BROSWERS DISPLAYS IT:
WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services

We will now review the XHTML code including the meat of the link, the anchor text.  An “a” tag means the anchor or start of a link, where we start the hyperlink code.  The “href” is the hyperlink reference or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that tell your computer’s browser where to go for the specific information (linked page) and download and pull it up in your browser.  The anchor text is text sandwiched between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag.  In this example, the anchor text is “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and is the text that is associated with the link “http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/”.

This is an important key factor in increasing your search engine rankings because the search engines use this (anchor) text to aid in determining the relevance of the linked page to the anchor text used as incoming keywords.  The use of this particular anchor text will help the domain, web.marketing.webpaws.com, perform better in search engine results for the keyword “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and similar keyword phrases too (e.g., “Internet Marketing”, “Marketing Services”, WebPaws.com, etc.)

Anchor Text: The meat of the link is a post from: WebPaws.com

Which Search Engine do you use the more frequently?

Click the link below to open the poll and submit your response!

Check on the poll’s results over the next few weeks.

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/34832/rtuyg

Which Search Engine do you use the more frequently? – Poll is a post from: WebPaws.com