CompuKol Connection » Search

Use SEO as a Tool to Satisfy Clients

Carolyn Cohn — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely valuable tool to give to your clients so that their business capabilities are enhanced and so that they have a greater chance of succeeding through their online business capabilities and interactions.

Please forgive the constant repetition of the phrase “Content Is King”; however, truer words were never written. The way that you and your business will succeed through your social media interactions is with your content. Of course, it goes without saying that your content has to be well written, exciting, and informative. The fact is that you have tremendous capabilities when it comes to providing your clients with valuable content. The big question, now that you have the content to share with your clients, is how you truly give them what they want and need in order for them to succeed in their businesses.

Find out what they want and need

Sometimes the most simplistic approach is the most effective one. When it comes to clients, the majority of them won’t mind if you ask them what they want. In fact, it will probably make them happy to know that you are definitely putting their needs first by asking them how you can solve their problems. A great first step when it comes to gathering information about what your customers want and need is to send them a survey (through a free survey tool like Survey Monkey or Zoomerang). Once you have signed up for one of those services, you will need to create some questions, such as

How can you help them to run their business more effectively?
What do they consider the most valuable among your products and/or services and why?
Exactly what do they lose sleep over when it comes to their business?
What improvements would they like to see when it comes to your business offerings?

Your questions should be clear and concise and, of course, they should focus on the needs of your particular target market. There is nothing worse for the recipient than long-winded and/or numerous questions. You may also want to consider offering an incentive as a reward for taking the time to answer your survey (such as a discount coupon, free gift, etc). This will make your clients happy and it will cause your relationship to grow stronger.

The responses to your survey

After you have gathered the responses to your survey questions, you need to study them very carefully. Be prepared to receive both positive and negative comments. As painful as it may be to receive negative comments, you should be open minded and use them as a learning and growing experience for your business. Those comments may make you aware of an issue that you didn’t know existed. You can’t fix something that you don’t know about. As a result, you will be improving upon your existing offerings and presenting superior products and/or services. You should ask yourself the following questions based on the results of the survey:

What additional services can I provide to my clients based on their feedback from the survey?
What specific changes can I make to what I am offering?
How can I fulfill my clients’ needs in a unique fashion?

Once you have come up with answers to those questions, it will be time to take action. With the feedback in mind, you can provide effective and helpful content that the search engines will love. The content should contain what offerings from what the clients asked for. If you are at all unclear about how to focus your content in that direction, your hints are in the feedback from your clients (look for the strongest and most prevalent keywords and key phrases).

SEO content writing results

After you have formulated your plan and have added the effective content to your website (or other elements of your web presence), you need to find out if what you did was effective. Keywords and key phrases are at the heart of what is important when it comes to content and SEO. The way to truly measure the results is by looking at an analytics tool (such as Google Analytics). This will tell you where the clients are going.

Once you have identified that information, you will be able to understand what your clients want and need. There is no better source than your clients to know what you need to do in order to make them happy.

Conclusion

SEO is an extremely important and useful tool when it comes to the success of your business. It isn’t just an acronym that people utter with no strength behind it. It is a critical part of your business’s success when it comes to online interactions and online relationships. The more valuable the information that you share with other people is, the stronger and more long lasting your relationships will be. That also means that the quality of your SEO must be top notch. Of course, that will ultimately translate into more success.

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SEO: What it is. What it Does.

Allan Berger — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

If you have a website or are researching websites, you’re sure to have heard the term SEO bandied about quite a bit. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO techniques are used to improve the visibility and ranking of a website when people conduct a search on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Generally speaking, the higher on the search page that a website displays and the more frequently a page appears in searches, the more visitors it will receive from search engine users. How optimal is it to appear on the first page of a search? Very. Up to 42% of search users click the top-ranking link, as few as 8% click the second-ranking link. Click-through rate (CTR) drops thereafter. Sixty-two percent of users click a link on the first page of search results, 23 percent go to the second page.

The drive to come up on the first page of a search — and in the first, second, or third place — is one determined by traffic and relevance and can be an expensive one. Most small businesses may not be able to justify the time and money spent to come first in search engines that continually change their algorithms, and to outrank similar, larger companies with more traffic. However, there are some things you can do that will help.

First Steps

When optimizing a website, you must first consider how search engines work and what search engines are used more often by your target customer. Also, think about how people conduct a search. What actual search terms might they enter when searching for a business or service such as yours?

The next step is for you, or your website developer, to edit website content to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to be sure everything is properly coded to remove barriers that may prevent search engine “spiders” from crawling through and indexing your site. Since effective SEO often requires changes to the HTML source code of a website and to a website’s content, SEO tactics can, and should, be incorporated into web design and development.

Five Things You Can Do for Better SEO

1. Title Tags – Each page should have a unique, descriptive title tag. A description relative to the content on the page helps people who are searching for you, your product, or your services.

2. Content – Content is King. Unique, informative, and relevant site content helps SEO. Use keywords within that content that you feel best describe your business and will be words customers will search for when looking for services that your business supplies.

3. Links – Build working links between the pages of your website and with other trusted websites. Ask business affiliates and other trusted businesses to link to your site as well. You should also use Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs to create links to your website and encourage followers to visit.

4. Keywords – When your website developer lists keywords in the HTML files of your pages, be sure that those same words appear with frequency in the content on your site.

5. Updates – Fresh content will bring search engine “spiders” back to index your site, and will bring your customers back as well, so update your site as frequently as possible. You may want to update some pages once or twice a month, and others less frequently. The more traffic you receive, the higher you will come up in searches.

Conclusion

SEO is a critical part of online business success. If your content is not recognized and ranked highly by search engines, people will not be able to find you and if they can’t find you, they won’t be able to interact with you. It is those relationships that eventually lead to greater success for you and your business.

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Driving Traffic With Off-Page SEO Tactics

Michael Cohn — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:00:26 +0000

If you have any knowledge of what makes your web presence successful and effective, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of it. There are different tactics that you can use. On-page tactics and off-page tactics.

If you use a combination of the two, you will most likely see that they are great in combination and before long, you will notice a marked improvement in the volume and the quality of the traffic that is being drawn to your website. Before anything else, it is very important to understand the differences between the two and to learn to use them most effectively for your business.

On-Page SEO: With On-Page SEO, you optimize your content, use internal links, and meta-tags. A meta tag is a tag in HTML that is inserted at the top of a web page primarily to describe its content and to provide keywords for use by the search engines.

Off-Page SEO: With Off-Page SEO, you use backlinks (links that lead back to a particular web page or blog), social media, press releases, posting on forums, etc.

Write blogs and submit them to bookmarking websites

Blogs are becoming more and more important for your business. Blogs draw search engine crawlers to come to your website more often and they help you to generate a greater number of backlinks by syndicating your articles to various websites and directories. There are numerous bookmarking websites from which to choose. Whichever ones you choose will most likely be a good choice for generating traffic to your business. Some of the more popular ones are

Stumbleupon
Delicious
Digg
Mixx
Reddit
Propeller
Technorati
Yahoo Buzz
Kaboodle

Besides the bookmarking websites that were just mentioned, there are many more that you should research. Only you can really decide which ones are the most appropriate for you and your business.

Get involved with forums and discussions

If you ask a few questions and post a few comments a day, you will spark discussions from many other people who are as interested in the topics as you are. People love to give their opinions about all sorts of things. The amount of time that you will invest in the questions and comments will be very little and the amount that you get in return from other people will be much larger by comparison. Your return on investment (ROI) will be wonderful. One thing that you need to be cognizant about is that the responses that you give to others online are intelligent, informative, and interesting. It is important that you are making a worthwhile contribution that is benefitting other people. It is never good enough to post merely for the sake of posting. Always bear in mind that you are building your trustworthiness and credibility. If your online contributions are not of value, it won’t help you at all. In fact, it may totally work against you if you don’t contribute valuable information. Other people may view you as a spammer.

Complete your social media profiles and share news updates with your online communities

You should start by establishing profiles on the most popular social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter). It is very important for you to put all of the appropriate details into your profiles so that people can start to get to know you. The more you share with them, the more they will get to know you and the more they get to know you, the more they will want to interact with you online. Once you have established a presence in the various social media websites, there are some steps that you need to follow when you have published a new blog article.

Update your status update on LinkedIn and Facebook
Tweet about it on Twitter
Share your article on forums and discussion boards
Post a relevant photo on a website such as Flickr. On many occasions, photos are more effective than words

Rewrite and redistribute articles

Many SEO companies are hiring people to rewrite the same articles with slightly different twists. The articles are then distributed very widely and are syndicated to bookmarking websites. Because of the fact that the content has been revised, the search engines regard it as original.

List your articles in local business directories

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) allow business owners to list their business with complete details (name, address, phone number, etc). This will enable more local traffic to come to you. You should make sure that your business is listed with all of the local listings websites for optimization.

Conclusion

The techniques that were mentioned here are used often and with great results (universally). It is critical that you use every available technique to increase online traffic to your website and this is an excellent way to do it. Of course, the more traffic you drive to your website, the greater your chances will be of acquiring more clients and of doing more and more business. Off-Page SEO is what allows your website to be ranked by the search engines. A search engine presence is critical to the success of your business. You should make sure that your SEO efforts are very precise and effective so that they work to your advantage.

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Making Yourself Visible Online

Michael Cohn — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0000

If you aren’t sure about your visibility online, an easy way to check is to Google yourself. That will tell you a great deal about what other people see (and if they see you at all).

If you find that you don’t have a great deal of visibility online, your situation doesn’t have to stay that way permanently. There are several different ways in which you can strengthen your visibility online.

Leave comments on blogs: It is critical that you read other people’s blogs and that you leave comments for them that will generate a lot of discussion. Having engaged and enduring conversations online will do a great deal for your reputation. It will allow people to get to know you better and to learn to regard you as a subject matter expert in your niche. It will also make people trust you eventually and your professional credibility will be strengthened, as a result. Leaving comments on blogs does not necessarily have to be tedious or arduous. It can be fun to engage in animated discussions on topics about which you share a passion with other people. You will start to feel (and continue to feel) that it is well worth the time and effort that you put into it. If you truly have a desire to increase your online visibility, keep leaving blog comments. You should also understand that if you leave blog comments, the engagement can certainly lead to other really important things, such as relationships that are mutually beneficial.

A good-quality, professional profile photograph: If you think that your profile photo doesn’t mean a lot, you are totally incorrect. You should attach your photo to absolutely everything you do online. It is obviously an important part of who you are and it gives people a visual association of you that will stay with them forever. Your photo should be recent (no 20-year-old photos, please) and it should be a good-quality headshot of you and only you.

Make a video: Making a video on YouTube is an incredible way to increase your online visibility. You can make a really short and really effective video that will entertain people and get them thinking at the same time. Most people love to watch videos and you really have no way to tell which of your videos may end up going viral. Let’s hope that all of them will!

Use strong and effective keywords: Keywords and key phrases are critical to the success of your business. They are what people type into the search engines when they are looking for a product and/or service such as yours. If your keywords and key phrases are not rich enough, those prospects will choose someone else with whom to interact.

Give more than you get: The more you give to other people, the more they will trust you and want to interact with you. Additionally, the more you give, the more other people will want to get from you (in the form of valuable and interesting content). As part of the content that you share with others, you should try to share links to valuable content that other people have shared. Everyone loves be honored in this way.

A wide variety of social media channels: If you are not on several social media channels already (some of the most popular ones as well as some more unusual ones), you need to connect with them as soon as possible. You should start with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and then do some research to help you determine which additional social media channels might be appropriate for your business and your niche. Once you have established connections on your social media channels of choice, start interacting. Remember that your approach should always be how you can help the other person.

Widen the scope of your diversity: The more social media channels with which you connect, the more people will interact with you and get to know you. You may want to consider some social media channels that are geared more toward graphic images as well as others that are geared more toward the written word. Having a variety of capabilities is extraordinarily important.

Conclusion

The wonderful thing about your visibility online is that you have some control over it (unlike many other things). It is really up to you if you want to have a strong online presence and visibility or if you don’t want people to be able to find you. Considering that you are in business, it is most likely safe to assume that you have a vested interest in getting out there online and making your visibility as strong as it can possibly be.

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How to Select Keywords

Michael Cohn — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Keywords are essential to your business. Without appropriate keywords, people won’t be able to find you because the search engines won’t list you. Therefore, if you want your business to succeed, you must use the most relevant keywords possible.

It is true that search engine optimization (SEO) can be a little frightening and it can be overwhelming to try to come up with effective keywords that really work well for your business. So, you might ask yourself how you get started on choosing amazing keywords. A methodical approach will probably work best for you and if you take it one simple step at a time, you will see that you will achieve positive results.

The following are simple steps that you can incorporate into your keyword approach:

Search for your brand: It is extremely important that you understand where your brand falls in the search engine rankings. Your objective, in this case, is to force your competitors’ rankings to fall below your rankings. You want your brand to appear as high up on the first page of the search engine as possible. If you are at the top, nobody else can be. You want to own that spot. Additionally, you need to ensure that all of the terms that are connected to your brand (such as brand-specific product names) also appear at the top of the page.
Gather suggestions for keywords: There are keyword suggestion tools that will help you to obtain a list of top-quality keywords. You can obtain this by entering relevant keyword and your competitors’ URLs into the tool. Remember to make sure that you include a variety of different terms (head terms, mid-terms, and long-tail terms). Head terms are terms that get less than 1,000 monthly searches, mid-terms are terms that get between 100 and 1,000 monthly searches, and long-tail terms are terms that get less than 100 monthly searches.
Beat out the competition: You should identify the keywords of your competitors by including their homepage URL to your keyword suggestion list. Then you can compare their keyword list against yours. That is an easy way to identify if you have missed any important keywords.
Hone your keyword list: Hone your keyword list by categorizing in by search volume, relevancy, competition, and present status. Your objective should be to choose 10 keywords that are part of your SEO strategy. Those words should include your brand name and four other relevant keywords. Your choices should be only the keywords that are extremely relevant to your business. You can look at the specific words that are already ranked in the search engines. It is easier to begin if you have a running start. An important thing to look at is your global monthly searches. Think in terms of conversion. Try to picture people searching for those terms in the context of your website and try to determine if they could actually be converted.
Develop a strategy to rank your keywords: Once you have your established list of keywords, you can create your SEO strategy around those terms. You need to watch the terms over time by monitoring the patterns of the rankings and by gauging exactly which type of traffic you are receiving as a result of those terms.

Conclusion

In as much as SEO requires a lot of effort up front, the results will be long term. Keyword selection is critical to the success of your business’s success when it comes to your SEO strategy. The keywords will make all of the difference. If you do it correctly, uncomplicated SEO can positively affect your website traffic and your brand awareness will increase exponentially.

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Using Online Review Services

Shari Weiss — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Nowadays, particularly in this economy, you have very little time to waste when it comes to your business. You don’t want to waste time with products, services and businesses that don’t really provide you with what you need.

Our economy today is very different than our economy of the past. There are several profound differences, which have paved the way for online search and review services that can really help business owners to get what they need quickly and effectively. They are:

High levels of unemployment
Less discretionary income
Falling home prices and foreclosures
Many scammers and snake oil salesmen
Faltering traditional media, especially newspapers
People putting their trust in their friends, rather than in advertisements, promotional materials, and sales techniques

All of those factors have provided a perfect platform for the birth of online search and review services. Those types of services, such as Yelp among others, feature unsolicited reviews from "real" people, not paid journalists, on a variety of local businesses from restaurants and dentists to clothing stores and electricians.

Many of the online search and review services began in the 1990s and now serve as a directory for businesses in many cities in North America, the UK, and Europe. People have written millions of local reviews in many languages.

The databases of these types of services contain directory information including store hours, phone numbers, address and driving directions. Business listings can be accessed via mobile browsers as well as computers and tablets. In addition to the reviews, site visitors can find events, special offers, and discussion forums.

Is your small business on an online search and review service yet?

Any business can set up a profile for free, but your organization can appear on one of the sites even if you don't put it there. They license basic business information from third-party data providers who gather that type of information from public records and other sources. They also get business information from the communities of which they are a part.

Since your customers will be talking about you in the cities where you have an online presence, it makes sense for you to take control of your profiles on those websites — set up your profile and answer automated questions; it all takes very little time. The administration pages for business owners offer many choices for sharing information to make it easy for users to know exactly what to expect. If you provide the information that prospective customers are looking for, they’re more likely to become reliable, paying customers. So fill out as much information as you can and keep it up to date.

To help business owners get the most out of their online presence, online search and review services offer free tools for business owners to accomplish the following activities:

Communicate with your customers– privately and publicly
Track how many people view your business page
Add photos, a detailed business description, up-to-date information, history, and specialties
Announce special offers and upcoming events
Recommend other businesses

To reap the benefits from these types of sites, you should recognize the "community" aspect of this social media platform, ie, you must participate — but not simply for self-promotion. Here are five beginner mistakes to avoid:

Don’t use online search and review services to leave bad reviews of your competition
Don’t use them to promote your friend's business
Don’t use them to “talk up any business in which you have a financial interest (they will find out and you will get blacklisted)
Don’t create an account, list yourself, then never log in again
Don’t protest and try to say that you didn’t read the Terms of Service

Reviews are the backbone of these types of sites, and people wonder if they are primarily used for people to complain about their bad experiences. However, statistical analysis shows that the vast majority of reviews range from neutral to five stars (the highest rating).

Business owners are advised to use negative or neutral reviews as an opportunity to engage with consumers and to offer solutions to problems:

Negative reviews are an unfortunate — but entirely normal — part of doing business. Don't be surprised to read the occasional negative review. While it's important to look for patterns in your reviews (the bread is stale, the same employee is repeatedly described as rude), you should take any individual perspective with a grain of salt. Some of the best advice we've heard has come from within the business community.

Contacting reviewers should be approached with care; Internet messaging is a blunt tool and sometimes good intentions come across badly. We've put together some examples to help you get this balance right.

Keep these things in mind as you're crafting a message to your customer:

Your reviewers are your paying customers
Your reviewers are human beings with (sometimes unpredictable) feelings and sensitivities
Your reviewers are vocal and opinionated (otherwise they would not be writing reviews!)

You can feel confident that the people who work at online search and review services will help you to gather useful information for your business for several reasons, including that:

The salespeople don't have back-end administrative privileges that would allow them to alter the review databases
Sales people sign agreement that s/he will not write reviews of any business while working for the online search and review service

Conclusion:

With the possibility of opening your business up to negative reviews, should you avoid setting up a account with one of these services? Given today's marketplace where customers have many avenues available for finding information as well as voicing opinions; the wise choice is to be proactive and manage your online business presence where your current and prospective customers will congregate. The common wisdom is to "Fish where the Fish are." Geomarketing, ie, local targeting, is becoming more important — and more prevalent. The best advice is to do some homework: check out the online and review services, sign up as a consumer, write and read some reviews, participate in the forum discussions and then carefully fill out your profiles. Make sure that your profiles are complete and that you are actively engaging with the other members of the online search and review services of which you are a member.

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Making the Most of Twitter Lists for Your Business

Michael Cohn — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:00:30 +0000

It is great that you have jumped right into Twitter and that you are leveraging it for your business. With all of those Twitter followers, you need to organize them in lists so that everything goes smoothly.

The people whom you follow on Twitter are people who share a common interest with you and your business. If you don’t figure out some way to organize all of your followers and the people whom you follow, you will have chaos.

At this point, you should create lists that help you to organize your followers into logical categories. Setting up Twitter lists is easy and very straightforward.

Go to your Twitter profile
Select the “Lists” button
Select “New List” from the drop-down menu
Enter the name of the new list. You should choose a name that you will remember easily
Before you actually create the list, you need to decide whether you want to make it public. Your public lists will appear on your profile and other people will be able to subscribe to those lists. It is your choice whether to share your lists with other people
Select the “Create List” button and you will see your new list on the main screen of your Twitter feed in the right column
Now that you have a new list in Twitter, you can start adding whichever followers you wish. Begin by selecting the Twitter handle for whichever follower you wish to add to your list and then select “Lists” on the profile of that particular follower

There are several different lists that you can use that will really benefit you and your business and which will help you to make the most out of Twitter, an amazing social media tool.

Follow the influential people: The first step is to find influential people on Twitter who are a part of your niche. You should organize them into a list so that you are always kept current regarding the discussions that they are having with other people.
Allow the influential people to follow you: If you want people in your niche to pay attention to you, find out if they have a Twitter account, create a list of people in that niche and add them to your list. After you have put them on your list, let them know. It is a wonderful way to begin a relationship.
Understand who is following you: A wonderful way to learn about your Twitter followers is by engaging in discussions with them. It is critical that you really listen to them and not just converse on a superficial level. You will learn a great deal about them from your discussions. Through your engagement with them, you will start to gather more and more topics for the content that you share with other people online. You will gain insight into what they want to read about, whether their interests are in products and/or services. A good way to build up your list is by either exporting the Emails that you receive to your address book (if your list is not very long) or using a service to help you export and manage your list of followers.
Keep up with the technology: Technology is changing so rapidly nowadays that you need to constantly learn about new offerings. The more you know, the more you will be positioning yourself as a savvy subject matter expert.
Monitor the blogs that you choose to participate in: When it comes to the generation of content, blogging is an extremely powerful way to go. You should try to be the first person to comment so that you get the most attention for you and your business and the most online exposure. People will remember you if you consistently start discussions on interesting and educational topics. You should follow your favorite bloggers on Twitter, which will practically guarantee that you are among the first to learn new information. Bloggers very often choose Twitter as their first social media channel to post updated information.
Pay close attention to your competition: If you want to learn and grow in your business, a smart way to do that is to watch what your competition is doing with Twitter. If you watch your strongest competitors, you will easily be able to understand what works and what doesn’t work.
Create papers for your niche: In Twitter, you are able to post updates in a newspaper-like format. The content of those papers is drawn from your own tweets, #hashtags and Twitter lists. You are able to make a list of the sources that you like best and then create papers for the benefit of all of your Twitter followers so that you can showcase the best material from your followers’ updates. People will really love that.

A really great way to put a good list together is to examine the lists that the other experts in your niche put together. If you see that the experts have put a list of reputable people on their list, it is the right list for you to have. The following are good websites for finding lists that have been created by other people:

TwitterCounter Top 100 Twitter Lists: This tracks statistics of Twitter users. You simply type in your Twitter address and your statistics will pop up
TweepML: This allows you to maintain and share your lists with your Twitter followers
TweetFind: This is a Twitter directory that contains Twitter lists. It is a smooth way to bring businesses and clients together
Listorious: This is a 3^rd-party website that manages an organized directory of Twitter lists. It allows you to search through the lists by category so that you can find the most popular lists
Listatlas: This simplifies Twitter lists by ranking them based on the number of followers that are contained within any given list.

Organizing your Twitter lists

You are able to access all of the Twitter lists that you have put together and are following from your Twitter homepage. The management tools on Twitter can assist you with viewing all of your lists at the same time. For example, HootSuite and Tweetdeck, enable you to create columns for each one of your lists.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the concepts of how to create Twitter lists, it is up to you to start using it in the most effective way for you and your business. There is no limit on what you can do when it comes to Twitter lists. Your lists will grow over time and you will find yourself asking what you ever did before you used that tool for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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How and Why to Use Twitter Hashtags

Carolyn Cohn — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:00:38 +0000

You have gotten used to using Twitter for your business. You have many followers by now and many people whom you follow in return. You must have noticed some tweets with a word and a # symbol attached.

Those words and symbols are Twitter hashtags. Hashtags are basically an easy way to catalog and join tweets together on a certain topic. Hashtags make it easier for you to find other tweets on the same topic, while at the same time, you are able to eliminate other tweets that are not relevant.

Organizers of events and conferences also commonly use hashtags for business. They use them as a way to keep all of the tweets about a specific event in one stream. The organizers may also use hashtags to organize and coordinate updates about events during emergencies.

How to use hashtags effectively

Using hashtags is an excellent way of extending your influence on your Twitter followers. Many times, Twitter users search for content that comes from people from all over.

Hashtags provide you with a way to build deeper relationships with followers with whom you have already established some sort of relationship online. There are many hashtags in existence that you can join as well as new ones being created on a regular and frequent basis.

You should use hashtags in your tweets. The hashtags should come before your keywords. To make it easier on yourself, you can do some research before you use the hashtag in your tweet to find out if the topic that you are tweeting about already has an existing hashtag.

Make sure that you introduce your hashtag to your followers by informing them about what purpose it serves and by requesting that your followers use it in their tweets on the same topic.

Hashtag etiquette

The rules of hashtag etiquette are still quite new and have not totally evolved yet. Common sense and proper social manners are good guidelines to follow. You need to make sure to use discrimination when it comes to deciding which tweets deserve hashtags and which don’t.

You should tag only those tweets that add significant value and interest to the discussion. Additionally, you need to be discriminating about how many hashtags you use in any given tweet. One hashtag is good, two are ok and three is the absolute maximum. You should be careful about using three hashtags on more than the rare occasion. You certainly don’t want to seem irritating to your Twitter community because of your contribution of hashtags.

Spam

With the wide usage of hashtags, unfortunately, the down side is that they have also become a vehicle for spam. Make sure that you don’t use hashtags on a tweet that is not related to that particular topic. Another thing that you shouldn’t do is fill your tweets with popular hashtags just so you will appear high in the Twitter results.

Choosing the proper hashtags

Your choice of hashtags depends completely on the type of business that you have and what you wish to get out of Twitter for your business. You need to make sure that your hashtags and topics are of the utmost relevance and usefulness to the people who are following you and to people who will be searching for you.

Starting your own hashtags

Hashtags can be used effectively to track social media campaigns that assist in creating a strong sense of community; a community that unifies your clients and colleagues with you. The first thing that you need to do in starting your own hashtag is to choose a tag word.

The tag word should be something that can be easily remembered, is easy to spell, and is as short as possible. Keep in mind that Twitter has a maximum of 140 characters per tweet and you certainly don’t want to use up most of that with your hashtag. Once you have chosen a tag, start using it and promoting it as much as possible.

Always make sure that your tweets that include hashtags are valuable and memorable to your followers. Remember that you can promote your tag via other social media channels, such as your newsletter and blog. Remember to include calls to action in your tweets at regular and reasonable intervals.

Monitoring your hashtags

One of the best ways to monitor your hashtags is by using Twitter Search. Twitter Search will allow you to watch people using your hashtags in real time and you can subscribe to an RSS feed so that you can see the results.

Conclusion

Hashtags are great way to boost the credibility and professionalism of your tweets for your business. They bring an entire new level to the quality of your Twitter content and it is yet another way for you to strengthen your credibility and expertise in the eyes of your followers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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How to Make the Most of Twitter Searches

Carolyn Cohn — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:11:08 +0000

As a business person, you have great needs to search for information that relates to your business and your clients. Twitter has tremendous search capabilities that many people are not aware of and therefore, don’t tap into.

Within Twitter, Twitter Search is an incredible resource when it comes to finding answers to your questions and the questions of your followers, as well as finding a whole slew of valuable information. The information that you will find on Twitter will be relevant, timely and very valuable.

Twitter can also be an excellent tool to assist you in building, strengthening and promoting your brand. The search tools also give you tremendous opportunities to find useful information for your business that you can, in turn, share with your followers.

Using Twitter Search

There are many search tools available, such as Tweetdeck and seesmic. These tools allow you to follow a keyword or search term instead of a person. Another excellent way to keep up the pace with social media is to follow a social networking search. For example, if you are interested in finding all of the new links about social media, you would type “social media” OR “social news” into the search bar. You will be amazed at the results that you turn up.

Advanced Search Operators

Twitter provides an advanced search tool, which is also extremely helpful. You will be offered an online form to fill out, which gives you the option of finding tweets based on words and people. In the “People” section, you will be asked to list who the source of a particular tweet is, who the tweet went to and/or a reference to a particular person. An alternative to using the form is to type “search operators” straight into the search box. If you would like to find out what your competition is saying about you to other people, type “from:janesmith OR to:janesmith.”

The following are helpful and commonly used advanced search operators that you will want to use when you are searching:

news source:twitterfeed This is for finding tweets that contain “news” and searched through Twitterfeed
traffic ? This is for finding tweets that contain “traffic” and asking a question about that subject
flight This will give you a search result about “flights” and tweets with something negative
movie romance This will give you a search result about tweets that are about romance movies and a positive message
near:NYC within:20mi This will bring up tweets that have been sent from within 20 miles of New York City
“happy hour” near:“Buffalo” This will bring you tweets about happy hours. The tweets will have been sent from near Buffalo
@mashable These are tweets that reference an individual on Mashable
superstar since:2008-04-08 These are tweets that contain “superstar” and were sent since 2008-04-08 (year-month-day)
writer until:2000-01-02 These are tweets that contain “writer” and were sent up to 2000-01-02
to:Microsoft These are tweets that have been sent to Microsoft
from:johnsmith These are tweets sent from John Smith
#sonnet These are tweets with the hashtag “sonnet”
pea –nut These are tweet that contain the word “pea” but not the word “nut”
black OR white These are tweets that contain the word “black” or the word “white” or both
“strategic partnership” These are tweets that contain the exact phrase “strategic partnership”
twitter search These are tweets that contain “twitter” and “search.” This is the default operator.

Another way to search in Twitter is to use the Advanced Search interface. This tool allows you to drill down your questions in a detailed manner. The search tool will even allow you to search for date ranges, tweets written in foreign languages, tweets that originated with a specific individual or an individual to whom a tweet was sent, and referencing specific individuals. Another interesting feature is that it will allow you to search for tweets with a specific “attitude,” (for example, positive-sounding tweets).

Location

With Twitter, you are able to search for tweets in specific locations. You can use a certain mile radius as part of your search criteria. You can use the feature “Allow Twitter to see your actual location,” which will really produce accurate results for you.

Tweets with URLs

If you only want to search for tweets that contain URLs, you should use the “filter:links” feature and look for updates from specific sources, use the syntax “source:Tweetdeck” and replace Tweetdeck with the 3^rd party application that you are looking for.

Saving searches

In Twitter, you are able to save any and all search results that you turn up. It is a good idea to save whatever you want to come back to at some later point. On your Twitter homepage, the sidebar on the right side of the page has a search box built in. Whenever you run a search query, you will be offered the option to save the search string for later. Once you have saved the search results, it will appear in the “Saved Searches section of your Twitter page under the search bar. If you ever want to delete the saved search, all you need to do is click it again to run the search and click on the “Remove this saved search” box.

Conclusion

Twitter searches are very effective, quick and valuable for you and your business. Remember; however, that this is only one component of your online marketing activity. You need to establish the best and most efficient way to use Twitter to find what you are looking for. It is important to use as many online tools as possible for your business so that your capabilities and resources are rich and diverse.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Searching Using Social Media

Michael Cohn — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:58:02 +0000

Search engines are incorporating social media elements more and more these days. Many Internet users spend a great deal of time on social media networks, whether they are obtaining information, discussing business, or socializing.

The essential element of social media is information; however, many times, it takes a backseat to communication when discussing social media tools. The undeniable fact is that social media sites are an ever-growing source of information.

The information can be in the form of a news publication that is being followed on Twitter, a friend sharing a link or following company updates on a Facebook Fan page or a blog.

Because more and more information is coming from social media sites, the search engines want a piece of the action. The entire reason for the existence of the search engines is to help users find what they are searching for on the Internet.

If you want people to find the information that you are offering, publishing the information and participating in discussions on social media sites will help your business tremendously. By doing that, you are giving the general public access to your information simply by searching. They don’t need to be a part of a specific community to get the information that they need.

Searching is about visibility

If you are initiating and/or participating in discussions on relevant topics, there is a high likelihood that those discussions could end up in search results in real time as well as in the future.

For example, if you are tweeting to peers on Twitter about a topic that is relevant to your niche, there is a very good chance that the tweets that follow might show up in the search results for that topic on Google, perhaps even a year from now, if the tweets happen to be relevant enough.

There are many ways in which your social media strategy can contribute to where you rank in the search engines. You can optimize your social media content. Many people think that they need to keep their searches and their social media campaigns separate. It is much more effective if they work together.

The traditional way that people use social media is for branding and to engage their customers. When people search on the Internet, they are trying to increase leads and sales by becoming more visible. If you combine social media and searching, you produce much better results. Businesses that optimize their content drive website traffic, reach customers, and build relationships, all at once.

Many people mistakenly consider social media as a direct marketing strategy. That is really not the case. Social media is a platform, it is not a strategy. If your goal is to increase revenue, you need to look at your return on investment (ROI). If that isn’t your top priority, you can find a great deal of value in social media through visibility, branding and relationships.

A great way to optimize your content is through blogging. It was discovered by marketers several years ago that blogs achieve search engine visibility through the links and the content that originate from the blogs. Nowadays, the Internet is rich in social media. Search engines, of course, have no choice but to pay attention to that.

More and more businesses are starting to understand that they need to be involved with social media. However, the attitude of business owners has not totally turned around yet. Many business owners are still being cautious and not using social media to its full potential.

Searching is not only important to marketing on the Internet, it is important to marketing in general. No matter what, your customers are online. Social media is becoming increasingly more important to searching. Searching is only one aspect of online marketing. There are many additional benefits to social media that we haven’t discussed in this article.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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