Firstly, think about your objectives: What do you want to achieve with your Facebook/Twitter campaign? Build  relationships? Build a brand? Achieve more sales? Or merely attract more visitors to your website? The answer will be sure to affect the way you use these networking tools and set them up.

Of the two, Twitter is the most customisable; you can change the colours, graphics, select your own url and even change the url whenever you want without losing your followers. If your Twitter mission is to get more visitors to your site, it’s a good idea to try to use some keywords in your Twitter url or full name if you can. However, you are restricted to 15 characters here so you may have to be quite creative.

By the same token, your bio is another opportunity to use keywords that are relevant to your business. At the time of writing, we have three listings on the first page of GoogleAU for ‘Sunshine Coast SEO‘. The third listing is our Suncoast SEO Twitter account. This partly due to our username and the keywords in our bio. However, don’t get too pushy with the keywords as this can have a negative effect on potential followers who will view you as being a bit ’spammy’.

It’s a good idea to customise your Twitter page with the same branding and colour theme as your other marketing tools, such as your website and business cards. However, there is a growing consensus of opinion that suggests it’s better to have a personal photo as your Twitter image rather than a logo. This is because other Twitterers (Tweeples?) prefer to engage with someone they can see, rather than an impersonal corporate entity.

The next thing to do is to get some followers. This is pretty easy as ‘Tweeps’ are always on the lookout for other ‘Tweeps’ to ‘Tweet’ with! However, be careful of who follows you; who you allow to follow you can be a reflection on the integrity of your Twitter account as well as your business. Other people will look at your followers to see if they can follow them too. So, unless you’re in the Adult Industry, you may want to stay vigilant!

The best way of growing your following is to search for others with the same interests and who are in a location that your business can serve. Following or being followed by ‘Tweeps’ with similar interests makes it easier to engage with them. You will find that each time you ‘Tweet’, you will get more followers but if their interest or location is not your territory, you are unlikely to gain any business with them and, more annoyingly, it amounts to a lot of ‘Twam’ (or Tweet spam, apparently)  when you log in.

In the next post, we’ll explore the mysteries of setting up a Facebook page.

 It infuriates me when I see and hear of so-called SEO experts / Gurus offering internet related services when they have no runs on the board themselves. Don’t get me wrong – there are many reputable website designers and internet marketing companies, but the numbers are small in comparison to those offering such services.

It just amazes me how these so called experts can sleep at night knowing that it is unlikely that they will ever get a return on investment for their clients.

Investing in internet marketing is no different to traditional marketing in that you must measure your results. But hey – there is no point in even considering investing in a newspaper advertising campaign for example if the newspaper is not relevant to your target market or if it has little or no circulation.

All advertising, whether it is online advertising or offline, must bring a return on investment -otherwise you might as well keep your money in your pocket.

How do you avoid the mistake of going with the wrong online marketing company? Ask Questions!

1. How long have you been the business of Internet Marketing?
2. Ask for testimonials and more importantly be sure to speak with their referees.
3. Search for their services online. See if you can find their website using keywords or phrases that are relevant to the services on offer. If you cannot find them on page 1 of Google or Bing this should tell you something. For example, if it is a Sunshine coast internet marketing company you are looking for, search Google using ‘Sunshine coast internet marketing company’ or ‘Internet Marketing Sunshine Coast‘.

And above all, if they offer a guarantee of a number 1 ranking for a keyword, avoid them like the plague!

Having designed and developed their online store for them, we here at Suncoast Internet are delighted that the subsequent Search Engine Optimisation campaign has been so successful it has allowed Riama and John to shut down their bricks-and-mortar store in Caloundra. As Riama told the Sunshine Coast Daily, “What I make in one day on the net would take me three weeks to make in the shop.”

We continue to enjoy a great relationship with Riama and John who are keen to build on this winning formula. Keep an eye on the gourmet foods website for more exciting developments and locally sourced delicious products. Meanwhile, check out the Sunshine Coast Daily article for yourself.

Well this might be how Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang is feeling about this week’s main technology news. The techno savvy among you will already have heard of the deal that Microsoft and Yahoo have struck with each other. At the beginning of 2008, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for US$47.5 billion but abandoned the move when Yahoo wanted more money. Now that Jerry Yang has left the building as company CEO, Yahoo has done the unthinkable and agreed to share services with Microsoft’s Bing search engine in a reciprocal arrangement.

Effectively, this means that Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power Yahoo searches when the agreement comes into operation, and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

So what? You may ask.

So what indeed. Even if the combined forces of Bing and Yahoo are enough to form a super duper new internet entity, at the end of the day, over 70% of search engine users use Google. Having reviewing the many comments on the internet at the moment, Yahoo plus Bing will need to be very special to persuade internet users to change their habits.

Funky looking Bing is being referred to as a ‘decision engine’ because it helps you decide what content you want to look at. We cannot ignore the fact that in just two months since the launch of Bing, it has become the 2nd highest referring search engine for our clients’ websites – after Google.  And, after these two have sealed the deal, whatever rating your website manages to get on Bing will be mirrored on Yahoo. The only trouble is that Bing currently accounts for around 2 to 4% of all our clients’ traffic sources, whereas Google accounts for between 50 and 60%.

Whilst we at Suncoast Internet are working on our Bing SEO strategy for getting our clients to show up on its search results, it seems that Bing has still got a long way to go to catch up and compete with Google.
 

At Suncoast Internet we are thrilled to have been able to be a part of Battery Wise’s relaunch by designing, developing and optimising their new website. Packed with images, information and helpful tips and articles, we think this website has everything a customer needs to be able to find out how to meet their battery needs.

But it doesn’t stop there! With a combined experience of over 100 years in the Battery & Automotive Industries, the friendly team can offer advice on things like RV Solar Installation, correct Battery Charging, Battery Repacking, specialised Auto Electrics and Auto Electrical Accessories like fuses, bulbs, Narva lights etc. They also stock Waeco fridges, inverters, lights and anything else you might need for trouble free travelling.

So if you fancy a free cappuccino while the staff look after your battery needs, look no further than your locally owned battery store.
 

The Google Trends blog post got 55 hits on the day it was published but it did not feature highly in Google results for either of the Hot Trends keywords (‘Mark Webber’ and ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’) we were trying to take advantage of. On the other hand, the good news is that, at the time of publishing, we’re on the second page of Google AU for ‘Google Trends’ and in pole position for ‘Google Trends SEO’. Woo hoo!

Why?

• There are 9,949,000 other websites out there that contain information on Mark Webber, including www.markwebber.com, Mark Webber’s unofficial forum, Mark Webber’s Facebook profile, etc, etc. Disturbingly, there are 846,000 results on Google for ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’. (The fact that there are so many listings on Google for ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’ is all the more amazing when you consider that no such image exists on the internet…yet.)
• Neither of our hot keywords was in the title of the blog post, whereas ‘Google Trends SEO’ certainly was.
• Our blog does not usually contain information on either Mark Webber or Michael Jackson and so the keywords were out of context.

So what can we conclude from this experiment then?

If you’re blogging for SEO purposes, write about topics that are relevant to the rest of your blog. This way you will build on your ranking for existing targeted keywords and keep your regular visitors interested. Your blog will seem rather spammy if it’s seen to be chasing popular, irrelevant keywords. And, lastly, make sure your important keyword or keyword phrase is in the title of your blog post so that it can be ranked highly by the search engines.

If you’ve found this post useful or if you’d like to tell us how you found this blog post, please post a comment.

 Answer: They are both current top search queries on Google.

How did we know? Simple, we used a couple of Google tools: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. They are free, simple to use SEO tools on the internet to help you research the popularity of particular keywords on Google.

Google Trends measures how many searches have been done for specified search terms in relation to the total number of Google searches done over time. The results are then presented as a graph. The Hot Trends tool shows which search terms and keyword phrases are popular right now and is updated hourly. ‘Michael Jackson autopsy picture’ was the 4th most popular search term at the time of writing – a rather gruesome insight into what intrigues the US internet audience.

Google Insights shows which top keyword phrases, or ones that are rising in popularity, are being used over a specified period of time and where. So, for example, you could find out at which point in the year people are searching for beach holidays and compare the results by region. At the time of writing ‘Webber’ was the number 2 rising search term on Google Insights for Australian internet users, reflecting the Australian driver’s recent Formula 1 success.

A word of caution though:  The use of random hot keywords may net a larger volume of visitors than usual to your site, but they are likely to achieve a high bounce rate once visitors realise that your site does not contain the information they are looking for. In addition, Google Trends only really highlights the keyword phrases that are most popular in the USA. Remember too that the keywords that are most popular today or this week may not be as popular next week and so your article may not have as much longevity as it might otherwise have if it were targetting a more long term keyword, i.e. that people might search for in the future. Try to use a keyword that is relevant to the subject matter of your website.

Which leads us to the purpose of this blog post: After publishing this post we will be keeping an eye on the amount and type of traffic – if any – it gets as a result of using these two popular keywords. Watch this space….
 

It’s easy to gain followers on Twitter if you post regular Tweets on topics that people are interested in. However, if you can engage in exchanges with other Twitterers it makes them take a closer interest in what you have to offer and is a more effective SEO tactic.

TweetDeck allows you to keep track of what is being Tweeted about. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the application and then uploaded your Twitter login details, you can view a panel of real time information on your followers. This allows you to respond right away to anything they may tweet about. You can use the panel to submit your own Tweets, make searches, upload a photo and even record 12 second videos to share with your followers. You can also synchronise the panel with your Facebook profile to keep track of your friends’ statuses and post updates to your own Facebook profile, although so far this doesn’t work with your Facebook business page .

One really useful tool on TweetDeck is the ability to shorten urls. If you’re Tweeting a link, you can often find that the limited Tweet space of 140 characters is even more restricted if the url link is quite long. TweetDeck will shorten those urls to make your Tweet more meaningful.

You can install TweetDeck on your PC or, if you’re really techo-savvy, your iPhone. Here at Suncoast Internet we’ve found that Twittering every now again as part of our SEO process led to Twitter being our 3rd highest referral site. So what are you waiting for? Start building your own Twitter network and get Tweeting today!
 

The scenario: The client had been contacted by an alleged SEO company offering to promote a search term, or keyword phrase, that potential customers might use when looking for the client’s business on internet search engines. For a fee of $1000, the company were promising to have the client’s website at the top of the search engine listings for this keyword phrase.
Fortunately, the client referred this SEO company to Suncoast Internet as the designers of the client’s website and they were able to intercept the call. When Suncoast checked up on the popularity of the keyword phrase being touted, it transpired that nobody on the internet was using it as a search term.  The client could easily have been conned into spending $1000 on promoting worthless keywords. However, a quick search on Google reveals that many other people out there have been hit by SEO scammers.

How do you know you are being targeted by a SEO scammer?

Their own site only has a low Page Rank: If you have Google tool bar installed on your web browser, you can check the Page Rank of the web page you are viewing. The Page Rank is Google’s view of the importance of that page. The lower the Page Rank, the less important Google considers the page to be and it won’t feature highly in any of its search results. If the ‘SEO company’ can’t get a good Page Rank for their own site, how will they do it for yours?

They guarantee you a page 1 web ranking: The fact is that nobody really knows how the search engine algorithms work. Factor in the unpredictability of competitive websites who are also trying to get on that first page of search results and you can see that it is impossible to guarantee high listings or traffic.

They are phoning from an obviously busy call centre: Quite honestly, if they have a call centre full of telemarketers touting for SEO business on a continual basis, how much personal attention will your website receive?

They promise top search engine listings for obscure, long tail keywords which aren’t actually that popular as search terms: If the search term they are trying to sell sounds a bit obscure, you can check its popularity for yourself using the free Google adwords keyword tool.

They are too cheap: In contrast these particular SEO scammers, some companies will promise to optimise and promote your site for very little money indeed. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, as the old saying goes. A proper SEO campaign takes many hours of search term research, modifying the content, promoting it through quality links and thinking up different ways of driving traffic to the site. It’s not a cut price process.

They can rank your site in 48 hours: If this were possible it would save legitimate SEO companies and their clients a lot of time and money. It can take weeks to see the initial effects and it can take months for the results to start going in the right direction.

What to look for in a legitimate SEO firm:

When you hire an SEO company, check out their credentials, testimonials and success stories first. You should expect them to provide regular reports on the performance of your targeted keywords and the facility to be able phone up and chat to a consultant for advice or feedback. A good SEO company will have years of experience and practice in the methods that are most often needed to produce results and, as is so often the case, you usually get what you pay for.

Steve and Rhonda came to us about the possibility of having search engine optimisation (SEO) on their website in order to get their site placed higher than their competitors in search engine results.

Having been suitably impressed by the quality and workmanship of the hand built campers that were in the showroom and being constructed in the onsite factory, we realised that, although their existing website was reasonably functional, it did not reflect the superior quality of these campers.

In collaboration with Steve and Rhonda, we are working out a comprehensive web development plan and SEO strategy to get a sparkling new, professional looking website up and running for their exciting business. Watch this space or, better still, watch the search engine rankings!