I could talk for hours of SM potential and how engagement with clients offers a revolution in sales and branding, but I wouldn’t have many friends left! Instead I’ll brain dump it here as an offer of gratitude for what is my last post for WMpS.

Commence Braindump!

Internet marketing has come on leaps and bounds in recent years and is proving itself to be as evolutionary as it is powerful. It has blown me away with the level of interaction, customer engagement and branding opportunities available with new web media.

Before I start it is worth noting that B2B businesses love the idea of social media, engagement and communication, giving them the “be nice and friendly” approach that big organizations lust for. Unfortunately, businesses aren’t social! Businesses don’t have friends, they don’t have opinions that matter and as a result businesses do not recommend to other people, thus social media for B2B is simply no better than banging your head against the wall! This therefore gives small businesses the potential to fight above their weight online with effective Social media marketing.

Engaging with potential clients and customers is a lot more beneficial if you are communicating with real people and not social media managers, as they have the opportunity to tell friends, family and will inevitably increase your brand awareness.

OPINION 1 – Social Media is for real people!

Successful social media is a special thing. Real social media is interaction with people, without using automation, sales pitches and discount codes; it is the opportunity to contribute t0 your industry community. It took me a while to realize the potential of social media and how it can be done effectively.  If you are genuine through social media, you can develop your brand reputation and become an authority that people will listen to when they need help, advice or information. Similarly to the real world, we all have friends or family that we could listen to all day, we ask them for their 2 cents and are glad we asked. My Uncles Bill is one of these people!

What does Uncle Bill possess?

• He is honest
• He gives advice
• His opinion is valued
• He communicates well
• He speak to you as individuals
• He doesn’t repeat himself
• And most importantly…………….He didn’t try to sell you something the first time you met him!

If you can create an online profile based on my Uncle Bill, you have a successful brand, people will want to hear what you have to say. If you can give something to the community, people will want to listen.

Uncle Bill is in a fortunate position, he has my trust, respect and I’m keen to hear what he has to say.

If I needed something, new TV, advice on a car, finance advice……anything, and he recommended to be a solution…………..Would I buy it? Of course I would, I’ve got no reason to doubt him, no reason to think he’s lying. Even if I was paying him, I’d still believe he would be doing a good job, giving me a good product etc. This trust can be implemented in social media with great effect.

OPINION 2 – Be my Uncle Bill!

How can this be achieved on Facebook and Twitter et al?

The difference between Facebook and twitter is an interesting area of social media, as they require differing strategies and often prefer different businesses and different ways of interacting.

I’ll start with Facebook!

• Groups, Pages etc can be a great and effective way of collecting your target demographic together. Creating a group and getting people to interact within the group allows them to do their own “lead generation” recommending to friends Become a Fan et al etc.
• Facebook social networks mimic social networks in real life. E.g. the majority of my friends are my age and from where I live, on Facebook this still applies, therefore if you want to target people like me! Get me involved! Similar people have similar interests allowing the organic growth of a group/page to remain of high quality ensuring that your community is a relevant and active group.
• PPC – Facebook allows adverts! Using the PPC element of facebook you can hone your demographic by ASL*, school, workplace, even under interests and common groups. This means that your advert can be shown to the exact demographic you are looking to sell to. This also works wonders for brand awareness. My friends and I like similar things (hence they are my friends!) this means that a large group of us will be aware of the brand even if we don’t click, we will have seen your logo, and brief blurb. If the advert is a good one we’ll click through, also I know exactly what we’d be talking about over a few beers and pork scratching!

…Twitter.

• Twitter has a really active community! Those who tweet, tweet hard.
• You can access anyone! Using RSS feeds of Search results you can see who are talking about, products, industry news, and your brand allowing you to respond quickly to give advice or help (remember my Uncle Bill).
• You can see who people follow and who follow individuals – this allows you to see micro communities developing on twitter and is a perfect place to become an authority.
• Retweets! – You may have a collection of avid followers who in turn have followers. If you produce quality content you can get people retweeting your content. Getting people to recommend your sites to other people is a great way of spreading your brand and reinforcing your position as an industry leader. Plus you could go VIRAL!

OPINION 3 – Group with Facebook – Be an authority on Twitter.

Thank you and Goodnight!

*I haven’t used ASL (Age, Sex, and Location) in years…..honestly.

Social Media Braindump and My Uncle Bill. is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Equally you could have 20 people visiting your site but if 10+ convert then obviously the page they are landing on is offering them the information/products the needed and therefore gave them the opportunity to complete one of your goals (Goals = Google Analytics). A good SEO strategy is often the balance between ranking well and having a perfect landing page. You cannot achieve both simply because customer usability differs from search engine best practice, the balance is the key to a successful strategy.

How can I achieve the right balance?

Here comes the interesting part……

Achieving the balance is a relatively easy thing to do, the only issue is that it is time consuming and inevitably a long process, with no easy way of testing any quicker. The simple ways are often the best, and this continues with A/B testing.

First of all……..What is A/B testing

A/B testing is essentially (I’ll save you looking on wikipedia) “a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. A classic direct mail tactic, this method has been recently adopted within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails and landing pages.

Significant improvements can be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and colors. However, not all elements produce the same improvements, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest improvements” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

In Practice, A/B testing allows you to display 2 different web pages and monitor the results. Simply, you can optimize your pages within an inch of their lives, in order to find the best converting page. Google Analytics offers the perfect platform in which to execute this format of A/B testing.

Google Website Optimizer gives you an easy solution to find out the most effective page for your users.

With a couple of clicks and copying and pasting of code, you have a testing environment which gives you evidence about what your users like more, simple indications that people like one page more than another or simply people buy more on one page than another. This form of experiments can be done hundreds and thousands of times to denote the best way to set up your site.

Although I can’t tell you the best layout of your site, I can tell you the best way to find out.

If you aren’t doing A/B testing you are losing money! It’s that simple.

SEO, Landing Pages and A/B Testing! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Firstly, what is good copy? This question is gets banded around every couple of months with people claiming content is king every other day, and in my opinion this is completely true. Content is written for readers in order to take action, not simply for search engines. However getting the balance right is the most difficult and interesting element of writing SEO content. Writing SEO content is the balance between the creative and the analytical, giving writers the task to find the middle ground pleasing both parties in equal measure.

Rant Over!

Now 5 elements of SEO Content

1. Title and Headlines

If you optimize anything it has to be the title and or headline. The title gets people to click through to your article, it therefore needs to be engaging from the start, if your audience does click through, your article or content will be thrown to the road side like millions of other articles, emails and web content.

From a Search Engine perspective, Keywords in the title will give them information on the content of the post; the title tag is one of the most important pieces of information search engines have to decide what the content is about. The emphasis on keyword optimization makes sense for titles and headlines however, Don’t Forget the readers. Which one is better?

• SEO Content, SEO copywriting, and SEO writing
• SEO Content – 5 tips to write good SEO Copy.

2. Meta Description

Meta Descriptions are the 160 characters that are shown below the search result.

Here the battle between usability and search engines comes together again, giving validity to either side of the argument. The Meta description again offers both parties information to help them; again it is important to remember the pecking order and who it is you are writing for. There are metrics and KW density scores to establish how many keywords should be in a given Meta Description – Personally I don’t like these metrics, if you are writing for a human readership it shouldn’t be based on metrics, especially with the development of Google semantics in relation to KW the cramming of keywords is something left in the past. However, again similarly to Titles the information based in Meta descriptions can offer search engines information about the content – especially when this is aligned with title information and the content itself.

3. Content

Content! Content! Content!

For me content is paramount to any marketing campaign – possibly everything!

Unique and regularly updated content is a big plus for search engines; Google et al appreciate fresh content as much as they hate duplicate content. Your content should be highly relevant to your title and Meta description which not only ensures that readers get what they click for, but so search engines can carry the semantic relations through the titles, meta data through to the content.

With regards the content of the content (does that make sense?) you need to ensure that the keyword focus is consistent through the content, again aligning with the keywords focused in the previous 2 areas.

It’s generally accepted that very brief content may have a harder time ranking over a page with more substantial content. So you’ll want to have a content body length of at least 300 words.

4. Keyword Density

The magic number in online copywriting has to be keyword density and frequency. Density being a percentage of the words on the page is the focused keyword, whilst frequency is how many times on a given page the keyword appears.

Keyword frequency is obviously a relevant metric as well as being a measurable one, whilst density is slightly more obscure as to its accuracy. However the measurable frequency obviously depends on the amount of words on a page and therefore relies on KW density metrics.

In layman’s terms you can only measure KW frequency dependant on the overall length of the content itself. As I mentioned above KW metrics aren’t the most important element to a copywriter and really shouldn’t be the main focus of your writing. With Google’s development towards semantic metrics and interpreting what content is actually about, both copywriters and search engines will eventually fade out the importance of keywords and focus on semantics.

5. Linking and Page links

I’m sure Tom will have his own views on page linking but simply from a copywriting sense linking can really help you content to be seen and your content itself can influence website link structures increasing SEO potential of your copy.

I have a simply mantra when it comes you using content for linking. It’s a general theory for best practice accepted by the majority of copywriters.

Make sure you links are: -

• Using relevant anchor text (including your keyword focus)
• Link in the first paragraph – get a link in nice and early
• Link internally to relevant pages to strengthen back links
• Don’t overdo it! – For usability I hate seeing a page full of links!

Done!

Contact us for information about how online copywriting can enhance your rankings.

Copywriting – How to do it well is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

We’ll look at the process of writing SEO content and what we need to do to make it readable by both parties and also make it worthy of remembering.

Before we start looking through each element of writing good copy I firstly want to reiterate the fact that “content is king!” you can optimize and market your content to within an inch of its life, but if your content is weak or spam, people are not going to read it, it is that simple.

Lesson 1: People buy products not Search Engines.

Many copywriters assume that all they have to do is produce optimized content with the relevant links and have a common keyword flowing through the article, the search engines will love it and in no time your article will be ranking bringing in more traffic than the M25. Sadly this is a common mistake and the copywriters have forgotten one small element, the reader! If it’s not worth reading people won’t!

Lesson 2: People are more important than positions.

Keyword Lists

Before we start we need a keyword list. Keyword lists are the go to point for any copywriter, you have a list of words that the client and yourselves have agreed to optimize for, and you should focus your writing on these words by doing the following: -

• Include the KW in Meta data relating to the article.
• Use the KW as anchor text (if necessary).
• Use the KW in Title or Headers.
• Use Google KW search tool to find KW suggestions or similarities.

Including your KW in relevant places allows search engines the opportunity to understand what the article is about, and what term the article is worth ranking for. Secondly the anchor text is a piece of information that search engines carry through to the linked site again further suggesting to search engines what the page/target page is all about.

Content Structure

If you have a good structure to your articles, people will want to read it and will be intrigued to find out what you are trying to say. If you keep your readers interested they are more likely to finish reading your article with a desire to act on the information you’ve just given them, more often than not to click on a relevant link on the page (one of yours!).

4 steps to article success!

1. Introduction
2. Body
3. Conclusion
4. Resource Box

The resource box is an increasingly valuable asset in article marketing. Some article submission sites allow little to no HTML within the article giving you the chance to place any HTML in the resource box at the end. Not only is this annoying to using article marketing as a form of link building, but secondly it highlights the importance of getting people to finish reading what you’ve written.

Lesson 3: Get people to read the next sentence

Headers

This for me is the most fascinating element of writing copy, and to be honest if you get this right, you’re already in a winning position. Many social bookmarking sites and article sites just show your title and a small and brief description of the article and what it’s all about.

Your Header needs to evoke action, it is the first opportunity to get people to look at your article, and you need something that gets people clicking. The title needs to be worthy of finding out more information otherwise you’re on the heap with the majority of other articles.

Lesson 4: Write a Compelling Title

Do research – use analytics and research to see what responses you get from your articles, what headlines have the most clicks? What anchor text works well? Which links do people click on?

You have the ability to track clicks and user activity, make the most of it and do your research!

The final lesson is an obvious one but still one I’d highly recommend!

Lesson 5: Keep Reading!

5 Point Plan for SEO Copywriting is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

YouTube claim to have 20 hours of video footage uploaded every minute. With the shear amount of content being distributed through YouTube it is not surprising that in October 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and have continued to improve the YouTube service by integrating video into their search results as well as introducing video search as a separate element all together.

With Google presenting open arms to YouTube, search engines still make up only 11% of all sources for video download.

• Search engines: 11.18%
• Social networks: 3.66%
• Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%
• Video search engines: 0.63%
• Email/IM: 0.05%
• Everything else (almost all blogs ): 80.88% of all referred traffic.

From TubeMogal.com

With 81% of video traffic being linked to by blogs it is instantly apparent that any social media campaign needs to include video marketing as a way of penetrating the social landscape. For any attempt towards a viral video the ability to saturate the blogosphere allowing embedded content to be shared across a wide range of blogging sites and platforms. Once the content is established on blogs the viral emails, social networks and word of mouth soon takes hold, these three elements are integral to a successful campaign. With the fusion of online social networks and mobile technology, the opportunity for viral content to be accessed has never been so abundant.

Smartphones are allowing video content to be viewed away from the computer allowing successful viral video to have potential exposure 24 hours a day.

How to make a viral “Viral?”

1. 1. Get under the skin of the people who view your content Find out what they like to talk about. What do they like to watch?
2. 2. Choose appropriate viral triggers. Viral triggers are the key to getting your content out into the community, what makes people tell their friends. Once you identify that, turn it up! Turn it up high! For example comedy works well!
3. 3. Make it accessible – make sure that people have different ways of accessing the content, Embed code, short URL’s, emails, downloads, mobile friendly etc. make sure that even the slowest, smallest computer or mobile phone can access the video. Don’t miss anyone out. DO this and you instantly have a chance for an internet meme.

Video Marketing – How YouTube helps links, traffic and conversions? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Is social media a platform for such moral battles?

Do Facebook have the right to stop your own social media suicide?

How important is a consistent social media profile for individuals, companies and online businesses?

What is Social Media Suicide?

Remember when MySpace came around and I had pictures of myself in a dress and Boyzone were my favourite band? Or those uni pics that just won’t go away!, No? Good!

Social Media suicide is an easily accessible way of removing a profile completely, erasing content and your history. The ability to remove a shady history (as above) is essential maintaining a correct and up to date online presence. Social media suicide is the complete removal of profiles from any given social network, be it Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Linkedin.

For companies using social media, the ability to come to your potential customers with a clean and current profile is vital in portraying a professional outfit.

Social media was never meant to replace social life, if anything social media was there to enrich your social life. However, with twitter finally showing a slow down to user registration, people are now over the initial hype of social media and companies and people alike are starting to use their profiles more effectively.

The suicide machine since December has had over 60,000 friends deleted and over 200,000 tweets removed. Showing that people are keen to be removed from social networks.

Is Facebook Saving lives?

In a statement the social media platform said: “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which are violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We’ve blocked the site’s access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR.”

Online euthanasia has therefore taken hold, you’ll soon have to visit a .ch (Swiss) domain to remove yourself from Facebook. The Morality issue has bridge the gap between life and digital, with online morality posting the most poignant of questions.

“Do you deserve the right to commit social media suicide?”

Facebook Saves Lives is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

With expansion of our clients web development needs we are excited about the arrival of Pedro, Chris and Gurjeet  to give Peter and Dave some friendly company.

On Behalf of Mike and the team, Welcome to WMPS!

New Additions to WMpS is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz last week posted his views on personalized search so I’ve decided to put my two pence in to reiterate the point that Rand and his team put forward by considering how personal search could change the SEO landscape.

What is Personalised Search?

To update those who took their eyes and ears off SEO. Google recently announced the development of personalized search, giving users custom results depending on their browsing history. This development has the potential to improve usability for everyone, but could have interesting affects to the SEO strategies of many, especially those who are trying to become leaders in their SERPs.

Firstly, personal search is a big deal. Personal search is yet another way for Google to be producing different results. SEO strategies will struggle to determine how this affects their traffic simply because due to personalized search some users will “favour” your website and others won’t, thus giving little information back to the effectiveness of your strategy.

The main concern is the possibility of Google and other search engines using user monitoring to influence the rankings regardless of user customization. If this is the case the gap between large brands and small e-commerce retailers will increase with the larger sites squeezing the niche market in which small online retailers thrive. That being said Google still believe in the cornerstones of SEO and Search Engine results.

1. Make your site accessible
2. Optimize for user based keywords
3. Create compelling content
4. Earn relevant links from sites in your field.

The implementation of personalized search results may contradict the Asimov style rules above placing doubt on “what makes a good search result”

Personalised search will no doubt bring the importance of brand bias back into the frame with many users choosing sites with brand loyalty, bringing larger brands into SERPs simply because of the brand name. i.e. specialistrunningtrainers.com may be better than nike.com for “running trainers” but due to brand loyalty our smaller site will be outranked in their own niche due to user brand loyalty.

This potential for the larger companies to instantly outrank simply through reputation and user popularity has the potential to make SEO a more demanding and challenging profession.

So what can we do?

It may sound cliché but we need to stick to the rules above whilst placing even more effort on user experience and visitor satisfaction, the importance of low bounce rates and low S.C.A.S.I maybe the difference between being included in personalized search and being left waiting in the wings. Users now have a direct communication with Google giving them the ability to rearrange search results based on user experience, if your site is ranking 10+ but your content is loved by its users you can guarantee that Google will notice and will give their users what they want. Whether they will use the personal search data to influence search result as a whole are yet to be seen, but it is something that the SEO community is keeping an eye on.

Google Personalised Search is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

1. The value of Twitter hits $1 billion.

Twitter went stratospheric this year leading the way for micro-blogging. Twitter’s rocket-like increase in users peaked in September after a growth plateau in the latter half of the year. Market analysts suggest that the free media attention twitter has received is verging on £100 million pounds of advertising. Celebrities and Marketers alike have taken to twitter like a duck to water bringing them closer to their demographic. In a year where the world economy has taken a downturn and global warming is on the up, thanks to twitter, everybody knows about it as soon as it happens!
2. Facebook

Facebook again have had their fair share of media attention with the community reaching over 350 million (more than the population of the USA) and is proud to announce that it is still growing, in September of this year they also announced that it had a positive cash flow with shares rising 42% in four months. The big story emanating from Facebook this year was the acquisition of FriendFeed – the real time feed aggregator was bought by Facebook for $15 million in cash and $32.5 million in stocks. We are looking to the FriendFeed developers to be on  the brink of creating something that will revolutionize the Facebook experience.

3. People Power + Real Time Search

With the arrival of micro-blogging and real time search, the web space is filled with part time journalists keeping the world up to date with real time events.

The aeroplane accident in the Hudson river was reported first on twitter with passengers tweeting about the incident. Politics reared its ugly head in June with the questionable presidential election in Iran, Facebook and Twitter were rife with people updating the world with the situation in Tehran. Social Networking became the most popular hubs on the internet taking over “porn” as the most popular use for the internet.

Google and Bing have latched on to the real time bandwagon offering real time search results. Just last week Google announced the introduction of real time search results into their regular search results. Search Engines are now trying to include forum posts as well as social media to give the search results a more “socially accurate” result.

How has Social Media changed our lives in 2009? | 3 biggest social media stories of 2009 is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

It has been a long time coming, but with another hectic year in the online marketing world we’ve managed to find time to set our blog up.

At WMpS we strive to be the pinnacle of online marketing and digital media by aiming to increase traffic and convert more of your customers. With an excellent track record we are proud of, we consider ourselves to be class leaders.

We achieve these standards for a range of “blue chip” travel, retail and shopping companies, through digital marketing expertise backed up by cutting edge technologies.

Spear heading our digital technologies is our excellent Online Trading Architecture (OTA). Companies such as Next use our e-commerce based CMS with great effect, combining the latest in rich media presentation.

Our expertise is shared amongst many online marketing disciplines.

• Online Marketing
• Technology Development
• Website Analysis
• Website Design

We look to keep you informed on company and industry news, bringing you the latest information from the online marketing landscape.

Regards,

The WMpS Team

Welcome to the WMPS Blog! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.