Social Media ROI Success Stories

Social media is redefining the way we market to consumers and business prospects. Major brands are increasingly using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other channels to reach customers in a deeper, more cost-effective manner than traditional advertising allows.

While social media is growing, many companies are reluctant to invest in it because they haven’t figured out how to measure return on investment (ROI). Our case study collection, Social Media ROI Success Stories, gives you the inside scoop on how 11 companies are tracking and analyzing social media campaigns. As this report highlights, many are making strong headway in quantifying their initiatives and measuring their public relations efforts.

This report will help you understand how to measure social media and PR efforts. You’ll also walk away with a greater comprehension of how companies are using social media monitoring to improve a wide range of initiatives, from customer service and prospecting to brand reputation management.

How To Optimize A Dynamic Website ?

Internet technologies and e-commerce are advanced now and still developing day by day. As a result people prefer to have a dynamic website for their businesses or their online presence. So for some webmasters or new search engine optimizers who have experience in doing SEO for a simple static websites becomes necessary to know also about how to optimize a Dynamic Website?

For successful search engine optimization (SEO) of a dynamic website it is require to have some complex search engine technology and methods that are substantially different and much more sophisticated than the SEO techniques used for ordinary, more conventional "static" web sites.

In this article you can find some useful and important tips for how to optimize a dynamic website but first I would like to describe about what are Dynamic Websites?

Introduction to Dynamic Websites:
Now days often business websites are dynamic means that the web pages are dynamically built pages that allow user interaction and online shopping cart is an example for that.

Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the fly and usually built with a programming language such as ASP, PHP or JAVA. Often Dynamic sites are database-driven means that the site content is stored in a database and the dynamic code "pulls" the content from a database.

Problems in indexing Dynamic URLs:

It is really difficult to get dynamic web sites properly indexed in the major search engines unless they are professionally optimized. Even most search engines claim that they now index the majority of dynamic web sites but still only in some cases and it is limited to a number of URLs.

One of the most important reason behind having problem with dynamic sites to get indexed by major search engines is that Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as a set of infinite number of links.

Now days often dynamic web pages are created "on the fly" with various technologies such as ASP (Active Server Pages), Cold Fusion technology, JSP (Java Server Pages) and so on. Now all these pages are user friendly and works very will for real users actually visiting the web site, but they usually create a mess with most search engine spiders.

The main reason behind it is because all dynamic pages do not even exist until a user actually goes through a query or variable that generates the pages. Often search engine spiders are not programmed to select or choose any of query or variables. In this way, those dynamic pages do not get generated and that is why do not get to be indexed.

One of the main difficulties with search engine spiders are that they cannot read and are not trained to understand any of the dynamic databases of URLs which either contain a query string delimited by a question mark or any other database characters (#&*!%) that refers to as "spider traps." Once a search engine spider falls into any of those traps, it usually spells bad news for that dynamic web site.

As a direct consequence that most search crawlers have significant problems "reading" any level into a typical dynamic database, most of these search engine spiders have been programmed to initially detect and then ignore most dynamic URLs.

How to optimize a dynamic website to get it indexed by major search engines:

1. Using URL Rewriting Tools or Softwares - There are some URL Rewriting Tools and software available on the web that converts a dynamic URL to Static URLs. So it is better to use these tools to convert a dynamic URL of your site to Static URL.

For an example- Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions offers software that helps to change the dynamic URLs to static ones.

In this way, changing a dynamic URL to static one helps it to get easily indexed by search engines.

2. Using CGI/Perl Scripts - Using CGI/Perl scripts is one of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address.

In order to correct this problem, it is needed to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable.

When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable. So, in the above example "?id=586" is assigned a variable, say "X".
The dynamic URL www.xyz.com/abcproduct.asp?id=586

will change to- www.xyz.com/productname/A

through CGI/Perl scripts that can be easily indexed by the search engines.

3. Managing Web Servers-

Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn't installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

ColdFusion - It is needed to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the "?" in a query string is replaced with a '/' and pass the value to the URL.

4. Static Page linked dynamic Pages - Creating a Static Page that linked to an array of dynamic Pages becomes very effective especially in case you are the owner of a small online store. Initially just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages. And optimize this static page for search engine rankings.

Make sure to include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate "alt" tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business. Submit this static page to various major search engines including all the dynamic pages as per the guidelines for search engine submission.

In this way if you are going to optimize a dynamic website then all above tips can help you to successfully optimize your dynamic website and your site will get indexed by major search engines without facing any problem and you have a great chance to take your site among top ranks on major search engines.

Importance of Sitemaps

There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.
Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.
One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap ?

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap

The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.
Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.
Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

Avoid Flash During Website Creation

Adding Flash to your website can be either an improvement or a destructive practice. Sure, the Flash may help beautify your page, but what is it doing to your SEO? Did you really just help your website or did you set it back a few years?

Why does Flash hurt your website? It’s because of the very reason you optimize your site in the first place, the search engines. The search engines cannot read through a Flash movie as it does a normal webpage with text on it, that is why you may have heard it’s a bad idea to have a site that is completely Flash. It may be a bad idea to use Flash for other elements on your website as well, if you’re not optimizing it properly.

According to an article on Traffick.com by Andrew Gerhart, there are several instances to avoid when placing Flash on your website:

1) Do not use Flash for navigation
2) Refrain from storing your important information in Flash movies
3) Do not use oversized Flash files that take forever to load
4) People still use dial-up, remember they have to wait a long time
4) When adding Flash, do not make your site confusing

Gerhart continues to explain the results of having a website with too much Flash on it:

Loss of customers
Competition wins
Less traffic
Linking opportunities for exposure gone
Pages take too long to load, people leave
Branding possibilities diminished

As depressing as this sounds, especially if you love the idea of using Flash on your site, there is hope! It will take a little more work on your part (or the designer’s), but having an HTML/text version of your website available for people to view, in addition to the Flash version, is always a good idea. You can get away with having some Flash accents here and there on your site without having two different versions, but you have to be conservative with them, especially if you want a lot of traffic coming to you.

Here are a couple ideas:

Animate a logo. Make it a quick to load, small file. When you insert your Flash logo, place it over top of a static image of the logo. This way, if the user has Flash disabled or cannot see it, or it doesn’t load for some reason, they will still be able to see the logo.

Add an intriguing and fun animation. Don’t base anything off of this animation. Perhaps it’s a mascot, or a spinning money symbol. Do not rely on this to be linked to, but it might be a fun addition.

Remember above all (along with everything I just said), to not overcrowd your page. The idea of using Flash is to enhance your website, not detract from it. You want it to be more visually stimulating for your visitor, not a big jumbled mess that causes people to leave because they are too overwhelmed.

Don’t think that you shouldn’t Flash at all, you just have to be picky about what you use it for. Of course adding tags and things are going to enhance the SEO of an animation, but if your website it constructed mostly of these animations, then a couple tags are not going to help you in the slightest.

How to Build Backlinks ???

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

What is your Google Penalty Plan ?

If you're not thinking about this, you need to get started, and if you have started, how is it working out?

Google seems to be at a defining moment in time with it's penalizing sites with paid links, and almost constant shifts to the algorithm that make the SERPs a guessing game just about everyday.

So what are you doing now to make sure your site survives should it be hit by a Google penalty? You might be ranked very well today and making great money from the traffic that Google sends to your site naturally - so what if they flag your site for some deserved or un-merited form of spam?

With soo many people gaming the system, no wonder Google lashes out at the SEO community on occasion. We're the ones pushing them to provide more relevant results while at the same time doing things that some would question on a moral level.

Point is, Google delivers a ton of traffic. But the web is VERY big, and Google is not the be all and end all. You should be constantly looking for other ways to deliver traffic to your site such as:

Be active in forums - answer questions without trying to sell our product or service - instead, demonstrate your expertise in your answers and people will realize that what you say is worthy, and in turn will use your product or service when they are ready.

Write articles! I know it's old and tiresome and boring - but like the first point, it's a great way to not only show off what you know, but in inject your writing style. Some people will read you not for your content, but because they like the way you put things into perspective. Don't underestimate that.

Ask for help - I know a lot of people have trouble with this, but when my car breaks down, I have no trouble calling a mechanic. Use this same approach on the web. If you need help with a problem seek out the people who can help you. Many times in that process there is an exchange of information that leads to a deeper and "real" relationship - leverage that for links!

Tell 'em what you think - this applies to blogs, forums, articles and email responses. Why pretend to be something you're not? Like is too short to pussyfoot around and to be taken advantage of by other people.

Use your clients! I know I just said don't let others abuse you, and now I am saying to use your clients? What I mean is, your clients have other relationships as well, and if you perform well for them, they will refer you to their other business relationships.

See a pattern here? While Google is great for delivering text-based computer crunched results, at the end of the day, human relations (social engineering) is what makes you money. Treat people with respect, end any relationship with grace, and you'll see that over time, that crazy thing called karma makes it way back to you.

Enjoy the ride!

-To your online success!