Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one’s site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.

Snapt has over ten years online marketing experience and can help develop and expand your current online presence. Snapt has established itself in the real estate market and has begun expanding to all corners of the internet. With huge projects, constantly evovling technologies, and an open mind to new directions; your business can only grow with us.  If you have any questions or would like more information on Snapt and its SEO services please contact us using our online contact form

1. Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
2. Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
3. LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
4. Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
5. Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
   More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
6. Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
8. Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last year at this time.
9. Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
10. There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
11. Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
    
12. The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
    
13. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
14. Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
15. 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
16. At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
17. More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
18. 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
19. 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
20. More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt. As before, no single piece of information can be used to base an online strategy upon, or be used as a forecast as to the direction a specific social media channel may take in the future – you need to fully understand your marketing and business objectives before launching off into this apparently vast space. Thanks to econsultancy business, these stats can be tracked and used for your good.

The Competition Is Fierce

These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell.” (As a side note, soon after writing this, I got an email from someone whose goal was to have their Flash site be “#1 in all the search engines for the word ’spring.’” I kid you not!)

Don’t get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I’m quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they’re doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wand and make it so.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Does this mean that SEO is dead?

Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most definitely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to settle for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.

Almost every time I review one of those “put me at #1″ prospects’ websites, I see tons of opportunities for fixing the site in general so that it will work better for both their users and the search engines. They are almost always so focused on their “money phrases” that they completely neglect many areas of their site. Instead they put their special phrase on every page and never research the thousands of others that are being typed into search engines every day.

Content for Content’s Sake

Another trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately is the creation of content simply for the sake of creating content. What’s that all about? SEOs certainly throw the words “good content” around a lot, but why is it that nobody seems to know what that means? We now have a whole cottage industry of companies who will allegedly write “good content” for you. Worse, there are even some that will *rent* you content! Newsflash…good content has nothing to do with the history of your products. Nor is good content a bunch of madlib spam pages where you simply substitute keyword phrases from one page into the other. Good content isn’t stuff you write for the search engines.

What Exactly Is Good Content?

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet. The key to good content is creativity. Unfortunately, creativity itself seems to be a dying art. Being creative isn’t looking at what your competitor is doing and copying them. It’s being a leader, not a follower. It’s having your own voice and your own opinions and expressing them, regardless of what others might think. It’s pouring your heart and soul into your website, not looking for the next quick fix. And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines. It’s what brings targeted traffic to our own site for thousands of phrases, and it’s what will help your site gain traffic for whatever phrases relate to it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not fast. And it can’t be done with the flick of a switch.

Written by Jill Whalens on highrankings.com

1. Brand your Company – One of the great benefits to the exposure that you can get through social media is the result it has on the branding of your company. Branding is key to building a success in social media in the long-term, and social media is an excellent option for helping visitors to see your company in a particular light
2. Get Quick Results – Building a successful website takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Search engine rankings, for instance, can take years to build in a competitive niche. On the other hand, with social media you can develop content and be seen by thousands of visitors within the same day. For this reason, social media is a great option for getting a new website or blog noticed right away.
3. Social Media is Flexible -There are so many different social media websites that just about every imaginable niche is covered in one way or another. There are social news sites, bookmarking sites, and general networking sites. Whatever your needs and your audience, there should be an option to use social media for your benefit. Also, you’re not stuck to using the same social media sites over and over. If you’re not getting results in one place there’s usually other options that you can try out. Just make sure someone is monitoring the content.
4. It Will Lead to Increase in Traffic – Although visitors from social media sites may be less responsive than other types of visitors, success with social media will likely increase the number of inbound links you receive. Links will boost your organic search engine rankings and they’ll also drive click-through traffic your way. Both are generally high quality traffic sources.
5. Social Media Users are Predictable -The whole concept of Digg or Rating Systems wouldn’t even be possible if social media users were unpredictable. But the truth is you can usually have a good idea of what is likely to draw a response and what is not by tracking their online intelligence. With the correct Consumer Intelligence Engines in place, this will come with time, and of course the results will be much more powerful as you’re responding to your customers needs – NOT what you think they are. However, once you know a social media audience pretty well, you can cater content to their preferences with a pretty high success rate.
6. Building Links with Social Media is Safer than Buying Links – If you plan to cut out the need for social media by purchasing links from other sites, you’re running the risk of being penalized or banned by Google. For some, this is a risk worth taking, but in most cases I would strongly discourage taking this chance. Personally, I focus on building links for my primary blog through the combination of content and social media and linking them naturally.
7. Links Can Help Your Search Engine Rankings -Earlier I mentioned to social media can provide instant results. Well, in addition to sending loads of traffic directly, the links that result from social media success can get your new posts ranking very well with search engines almost immediately. It’s not uncommon for me to see a very respectable number of visitors from Google searches to a brand new post that just drew a lot of links through social media. While it will take a while to build search engine rankings as a whole, it is possible to create specific posts to rank well right away.
8. It Allows You to Leverage Your Existing Traffic -Do you already have a solid blog with a steady flow of traffic? If so, chances are you could leverage that traffic to draw even more visitors with social media. You may want to use voting buttons on your posts or ask some of your readers and friends to give you a vote occasionally.
9. Some Visitors Will Be Targeted -The biggest knock on social media traffic is that it’s not targeted, and that is typically true. However, visitors from niche social media sites can be very highly targeted, and on top of that, a portion of visitors from general news sites will be targeted as well. For example, if you get 25,000 visitors from a post on the Digg front page, maybe only 5,000 of them will have much of an interest in your site. Still, that’s a quick 5,000 visitors that you wouldn’t have had without social media. Just because a smaller percentage of the visitors will stick doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant.
10. The Future of the Internet is Social – Social media and social networking aren’t going away any time soon. The major players and the types of social sites may change of the course of time, but this is a trend that online marketers need to adjust to. Without finding ways to build a website or blog through social media you could be left behind by your competitors.

Consumers are more likely to buy when they search locally. This locally focused traffic is generally better qualified, and results in much higher conversions and purchases.

For example, someone in Orlando, Florida is looking for mexican food. Instead of directing them to the main page of your Web site, they’re provided with the specific landing page containing your business address, phone number, and other information specific to that location. Land a consumer on relevant local information and your conversion to sale increases ten-fold!

Keyword research for local SEO is slightly different than for local SEM. To get the most benefit out of the keyword research, each location should be analyzed individually. While this can be tedious, you’ll usually find that there are noticeable differences between how people from different regions search for products or services in their area.

For instance, you may find that in Orlando the most popular query is “mexican restaurants in Orlando,” while in California the most common search phrase is “California Mexican Restaurants.” This is especially true if you’re optimizing for a specific area or district within a city.

Through keyword research you may find that instead of searching for the city name, the locals search by neighborhood. The variance between the most popular search phrases might be small, but that slight difference in keyword targeting could open the doors for significantly more traffic.

Local business listings have made their way to the top of the first page in SERPs due to the pervasiveness of universal search. As such, local business listings have become an extremely important aspect of local SEO.

To create a strategic presence within these listings, each location should feature a title and description that is reflective of the localized keyword targets. Listings should also contain a link to the corresponding location page on your Web site. Don’t forget to include videos and images relevant to each location. These draw attention and help drive traffic.

How you go about creating and maintaining visibility within search engine results for localized search terms will vary based on the strategy selected. Whether you go with a test program or full implementation, you’ll need to focus your tactics around on-page elements, off-page elements, and local business listings.

On-page tactics for local SEO are generally the same as traditional SEO, but with a focus on the location being targeted. This means traditional SEO elements (e.g., page titles, page names, meta tags, keyword density) still factor in getting a page to rank. The difference here is the local focus of the keyword targets.

For example, with local SEO you’ll tend to focus the previously mentioned elements on a keyword target made up of the location and keyword. This would be something like “Orlando Mexican Restaurants.”

There are other local tactics that should be employed to round out your content. These include a geo meta tag, local address, phone, ZIP, and map within each page’s content. If you have several location pages, it’s important the copy is unique on each page to reduce any potential duplicate content penalties.

Finally, there should be a link to each location page in the sitemap. Careful though, Google suggests less than 100 links per sitemap. If you have a large number of location pages, consider creating a flat HTML directory of locations by hierarchy. In this scenario, start by linking the sitemap page to region pages (e.g., Northeast) continued with a listing of state pages that link to a complete listing of individual location pages.

As with traditional SEO, off-page tactics are important for local SEO as well. Inbound links should be created between your site and several relevant local sites. The link anchor text on these sites should be reflective of your localized keyword theme and the links should point to individual location pages and not simply to your home page.

Don’t forget to leverage social media. There are several local opportunities in the social space that should be considered. Take a look at items like blogs, images, videos, Wikis, and local groups. These areas provide an opportunity for increasing awareness of your local presence and they can provide another outlet for driving traffic.

Local SEO is an often overlooked aspect of Internet marketing that contains an increasing amount of opportunity for most companies. With a little research a strategy can be developed, tactics can be defined, and implementation can begin on what will likely turn out to be a highly beneficial endeavor.

If you aren’t familiar with the term Geo Targeting, it’s the method used by search engines to determine where you’re searching from, so they can provide you with (what they think) are the best search results or ads based on your location (ie. country, region/state, city, post/zip code etc.)

How do they do this?
By looking at a number of factors, such as:

Country-specific domain name – eg. .com or .com.au or .co.uk etc. etc.

• Where your site is hosted – be careful with this as a lot of hosting providers may have their offices in one country, but use servers and equipment based overseas
• Language used in your website content – even things like UK English vs. US English can make a difference due to spelling and colloquialisms
• Inbound Links to your site – are they mainly from other Australian websites, US sites, UK sites etc.
• Listing of your address / location / phone number on your website.
• Location of people who look at your site – if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com

7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site

Knowing the above information makes it a lot easier to perform a Geo Targeting audit on your site. Here are the things I would do:

1. If you run an Australian website and your main customers / clients are other Australians, spend the few extra dollars and buy a .com.au domain name. If you’re targeting clients in the UK, buy a .co.uk. etc. etc.
2. Apply the same logic (as above) to the web hosting – spend a few extra dollars to have your website hosted in the country that you are targeting.
3. Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with. For example the term swimwear, swimsuit, beachwear, cozzies, bathers and togs all mean the same thing but people in Queensland, Australia (where I’m from) rarely use the term bathers or cozzies – we wear ‘togs’.
4. An inbound link is like a personal referral or testimonial for your website. Having links from other relevant local sites will be far more valuable with Geo Targeting than having lots of inbound links from overseas sites.
5. Submit your site to local business and local search directories – this can often be one of the easiest methods of attracting local links and local traffic. As a rule-of-thumb, just make sure the directory presents well and that you are comfortable being listed amongst the other sites that are in the directory. If you think the directory isn’t great quality, you’re probably right and it should be avoided.
6. Mention your address, location and contact details in the footer of each page – this is one of the easiest things to do which can help tell your clients and the search engines that you are a local business. The only time this doesn’t really help is if you have offices in multiple locations. Mentioning a dozen countries / cities in the footer won’t do much for your local profile in each of those places. If this is the case you should build separate sites (or at the very least separate pages) for each location.
7. Build your brand locally as you will usually rank well for your business name before you’ll start ranking for more competitive terms.

Snapt is extremely familiar with Geo-Targeting and how it helps OUR customers take full advantage of the local markets. Why spend endless hours trying to get global search rankings when your main clients are normally within a 20 mile radius of you business. GET YOUR LOCAL CUSTOMERS! Local customers and clients are your repeat business and they are whom Snapt targets!

Local Search Traffic

Local Traffic for Restaurants

For years Apartment Marketing specialists and vendors have relied solely on driving traffic to their communities through traditional means. Until recent times, the mere thought of having a stand alone website was rarely even discussed – let alone the norm.

With so many websites now vying for apartment prospects online, it is even more critical to climb to the top of the search engines to get in front of serious apartment shoppers.

For over nine years Snapt, Inc. has been doing search engine optimization for apartments and apartment owners and operators.

How does viral video marketing work? By using one of the most trafficked video sites around: Youtube.com.

If you don’t already have an account, it’s free to set up. If you already have one, but haven’t setup a profile – this is a crucial step because it allows you to post your website URL; give a brief bio of yourself or introduce your company.

The best part about viral video marketing is that it can be twice as effective as writing content, because half the time, people don’t read it – most people like things presented to them visually.

Most people are visual learners and need to “see” how things are done. Try using your website content as the script for your videos and see how much more you can accomplish.
If this idea wasn’t true, television would never have made it. This is your chance to make your own commercial without paying a cent in airtime costs.

The great thing about Youtube: they make it really easy for others to post your video to their websites, even further spreading the word about your site. This is viral video marketing at its best.

So get started on that video, but be sure to keep it short – no more than 2 – 3 minutes to avoid boring your viewers.

Make sure that your website address clearly appears at least at the beginning and end of each video, but don’t try to keep it displayed throughout the entire video, this can be annoying and will discourage some people from posting your video to their website.

Youtube can get you the exposure you need, but you’ll have to help the process along at first, though.

Don’t just post your video and leave it to Youtube to bring in views. Initially, you’ll want to get as many people viewing your video as possible.

Here’s some quick and easy ways to do this:

Link to other videos

Link your video to other videos that are related to your topic. You’ll have to take some time to do some research for this, but it’s well worth it. Find high-quality videos with lots of viewer activity.

Link to social networking sites

Post a link to your video on all social networking/bookmarking sites that you belong to and encourage them to write a brief comment about your video

Email video link

Email a link to your video to everyone… and I mean everyone… that you have an email address for. Note: If you don’t know the people personally, you’ll need to introduce the video in a way that gently convinces them that they should view the video (and write a comment).

Briefly outline the benefits of watching the video. For example, if your company sells hand soap and you’d like to promote a new product you could say, “If you’ve been wanting to know how to avoid catching the swine flu, this video can show you how…”

Don’t worry about whether or not these two groups of people actually go on to your website or purchase anything. The point here is to create a flood of viewers and get some buzz going about your video.

When the webmasters at Youtube see that something is stirring in your area, they are more likely to link your video to other relevant videos.

To fully understand the importance of this, consider your own Youtube viewing experience. How many times have you search for one video and ended up watching tons of others solely because their links popped at the end of one video?

Next thing you knew, you stumbled upon something so great that you were compelled to post it to your site or, even better, you decided to click the link to their website. Well, that’s what I’m talking about here.

Youtube can expose your website to millions of viewers from all over the world. The sheer volume of visitors that surf Youtube is the viral component that makes it possible to increase your website traffic.

Your video is transmitted from one viewer to the next where it multiplies as they distribute it to other viewers that they come in contact with, and then they go on to transmit it even further – but the great thing about viral video marketing is that even though it can spread like a virus, it carries none of the health risks!

There are alot of other viral video sites that produce alot of quality traffic and inbound links. Contact Snapt for more information on producing and marketing your viral video.