Educational CyberPlayGround ®

How to write the best content
and get it noticed by search engines.

How to Build Community - Websites, Blogs, Social Tools. Traditional marketing functions like branding, internet promotion, SEO and social media.


#1 - Know your audience.

PR people need to know the publication they are pitching to, writers need to have a good knowledge of the publication's readers. Maybe you need to run reader surveys and focus groups to determine who your readers are and which sections they were reading. It is important to know your core community and the topics that are important to those readers. It requires constant monitoring.

BEAT THE DRUM

THINK: Do you know where the expression "drum up business" comes from?

When the circus sent the advance man/men into the next town to JAZZ up the folk - they beat the drum to get their attention and make their announcements to alert folks to expect them. The circus / traveling musicians / medicine shows and all the various people needed to cause a big noise that would get folks attention, prime the pump - get them ready, excited, and in the mood to participate which in turn sold tickets and merchandise.

ADVANCE MEN

Do you have advance men? I don't think so. Do you stand on the corner and announce where you are going to be? I don't think so. Can you pay the cost to advertise this information through TV - Radio - Newspapers? I don't think so and even if you did. . . who is paying attention.

Social Media - Bloggers who are influencers / Tweets / Major Media / Comments

Your fans (friends & followers) beat your drum they are your advance team. You let the people know when you are coming to town and how to find you. You give your fans direct access to you. It is easy to twitter with them en masse, building your tribe, you are the leader of the band, you are the leader of the tribe.

An online flash mob or sonic boom.
Crowdfunding: Thunderclap allows people to pledge a Tweet or send a Facebook message all on the same day at the same time in order to achieve the maximum, viral effect. Sign into your Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr account and fill out the form. That's it!

Social Networks | Social Networking Business, | How To Resources | Suggestions | Tools

Folks who want to do business and make money in social media listen for intent.

The Long Tail

Search was a red flag of intent - when someone searches for, say, email marketing, they're exhibiting at least a casual interest in the subject matter. Focused, targeted questions asked to search engines belie even more intent. Searching for email marketing is one thing. Searching for “what is the best email marketing company in Reno, Nevada” displays clear intent, and search marketers have learned to make the most of these long-tail, deep, obscure queries. (they convert like crazy, too)
How do you detect intent in social media? What questions belie intent? Think about your own use of language and then start playing mix and match with these keywords:

  • * recommend
  • * suggest
  • * anyone
  • * [your keyword]

Try it. Try it in Twitter search with your industry keywords and vertical. Look at a couple of results for “anyone recommend social media”:

  • * ianrbruce: anyone recommend a good book on social media metrics & measurement?
  • * splashrafting: anyone recommend free social media measuring tools? Looking at some at present need to start to use more
  • * hellaPR: Can anyone recommend any good cases or articles on hotels using social media, on a large scale preferably.

Each of these are home runs for a book publisher, a listening company like Radian6, and a socially-engaged hospitality chain. It would take mere seconds to respond and likely convert better than any cold call.

How do you listen? Take your top SEO keyword list and combine your top keywords with recommend, suggest, and anyone in various combinations. You'll be amazed at the number of people blatantly flagging intent to buy your products or services, if only someone were listening.

Search Engine Foot Print

Google has been saying for some time now not to focus on PageRank as it's only one of over 200 signals Google uses in its algorithm. Google even removed PageRank metric from Webmaster Tools so that people would focus on this less. I suggest not worrying about Google PageRank and focusing instead on SEO basics: title tags, content, and inbound links.

Thorough title tag audit. Title tags are very important for SEO so it's important to make sure they are the best they can be. Focus on brevity, your keywords and branding, but do not overload your title tags or repeat keywords. Google frowns on this practice; if it looks spammy, Google may even penalize a site. Google only displays about 65 or so charcters in SERPs and cuts off the rest, so keep them short and to the point
Your Title needs to include one keyword, your brand (your name), and a brief description of the page. It's also important to decide about placement of terms and branding in your title tags. Unless you're a well-known brand, it's probably best to place the brand in the middle or at end of the tag.
Content: Do a content audit. A rule of thumb for content is to write for users in mind using carefully selected keywords. If you haven't done this, go back and do it. Also, make sure the content on each page is relevant to the topic at hand. If it strays into other themes, consider
creating a new page for that theme.
Outbound links are concerned, this isn't really that important for SEO purposes. What you want are inbound links. Try to get people to link to your site, but please no black hat techniques. The quality of inbound links also helps, so try to get as many good quality sites to link to you as possible.
Remember, you want your users to use and stay on your site, so consider usability as well as SEO. For example, some of your internal links open a new browser tab. Use consistent window behavior and only open new tabs and windows when it serves a specific purpose.
How old is your site? Sometimes it takes a while for Google to index it. Do you have a sitemap in place? If not, get one in place ASAP and submit to the search engines.

FOLKSONOMY and TAGS

Work Place Twitter Tools and Social Networks

Find + work with the info in social networks.

Folksonomy describes subject related Metadata the Semantic Web. Words that describe topics given by normal everyday people which takes the place of the card catalogues in the library. The tagging system involves a complicated categorization of all the things that might exist—what philosophers call an ontology. Like any comprehensive world-system, the Semantic Web ontology is subject to endless revision, with many gray areas. Google uses “semantic†formulas that try to understand what the words in a query mean.