Majority Use Social Media Marketing, Still Have Questions

Sorry readers, long time no post, really busy in my job. Now I would like to share really interesting stats

• 88% indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes
• 72% have only been using social media marketing for a few months
• 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week
• 39% are using it for 10 hours a week
• 81% say the number-one benefit is generating exposure, followed by increasing traffic and building new business relationships
• Over half saw a rise in search engine rankings
• Out of social media tools marketers most wanted to learn about, social bookmarking sites ranked highest followed by Twitter.

For detail follow this link

Few SEO Tips for Designers

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a vital component of any website. As a web designer or blogger, it’s important for you to understand how SEO works. Here are few rules that one should follow for better SEO results:

Do Not Cheat. Period.
Google has hundreds of rooms full of genius scientists with PHDs, and their job is to work 60 hours a week to make sure you can’t fool Google. You can’t outsmart them. Ever. Ignore any advice on trying to cheat the system and focus on making great web sites with great content, and your sites will show up fine in searches.

Stick to Your Keywords
Pick a few keywords or phrases that describe your site. Use them, and words related to them, whenever it’s natural to do so. Repeating them uselessly is no good , use them in sentences, headlines, and links.

Content is King
Users don’t search for design, they search for content. If your site doesn’t have content people want, no one will look at it. Every page on your site should follow the Inverted Pyramid. Each page should lead with a relevant H1 tag with one of your keywords, and the first paragraph of text should be a summary of the rest of the page.

Clean Code is Searchable Code
Build your sites in a text editor, and write clean, human-readable HTML. The HTML should follow the conceptual structure of the page, navigation first, followed by the H1 tag, then the first paragraph, etc. Try to use descriptive tags when possible. Use UL for lists, P for paragraphs, H tags for heads and subheads, and STRONG for bolded text. Don’t overuse Divs. Your site can still be artistic and cool, that’s what CSS is for.

Links Have Meaning
Search engines pay a lot of attention to the links on your site, and the words used in those links. Never use “click here” or “see more” for a link. The link text should describe where the link will take the user, such as "more examples of CSS web design" or "learn how we can improve your SEO."

Title Tags for the Win
Every page in your site should have a title with the site name and a short description of the page. About 60 letters total. Include a keyword. Remember that the page title is what appears in search results, it should give users a clear reason to click on it.
Your navigation links should have title attributes that match the titles of your pages. It’s a small thing, but it will give you a significant SEO improvement.

Alt Attributes Matter
Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on CSS tricks, labelling a screenshot "example of rounded CSS corners" will improve your page’s findability. Labelling it "screenshot" or "image" will do the opposite.

Have a Site Map
Make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the structure of your page. Make one, and give it to Google.

Design for Humans
Search engines are designed to find what humans want. That means the best way to make your site findable is to design it for humans. Your job as a designer is to solve a problem, not make art, prove a point, serve your ego or break a boundry. In this case, your problem is to provide your users with a site that is easy to use and full of what they’re looking for. If you can do that, the search engines will find you.

Basic SEO Rules For Launching A New Website

Don't Re-Use Your Title Tag On Every Page
Most of the time, your website has been created from a template, which ensures that everything looks the same -design wise- from one page to another. This is perfect to get the site off the ground and out there. Most WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors work this way as well, templates allow for easy production of web pages.
The drawback to this from an SEO perspective is that the Title and Meta tags are all repeated. To get your website off on the right foot, change each page's title tag to reflect what the page is about. You'll be surprised at the good this can do for each of your web site's pages.

Keyword Research
It would be wise to do at least a little keyword research before your launch your website. Understanding how your audience searches is the most beneficial thing you can do for your website. Doing even the slightest amount of research can clue you into small idiosyncrasies that could be "gold mines" in disguise. Keyword research can also let you know how to target the content on your page and how to word each page's title tag.

Don't Use Keywords In Images
Your designer might yell at you, question your judgment, or complain that it will ruin the aesthetics of the design, but let me put it to you this way; "What good is a great design if no one can find it?"
If your keywords are embedded in images, the search engines have no clue that keyword is related to your page. They cannot "see" your images. So if the term "ceramic vessel" is important to your business, make sure it's actual text somewhere within your content, not part of an image.

Check Your Robots.txt File
Check, double check and go back and recheck that Robots.txt file. Make sure it's in the root folder of your domain. Ensure all the folders and files you want to be found by the search engines are allowed. Any development folders, javascript folders, css folders or private folders, you do not want to end up in a search engine results should be disallowed.
For more information check out: Robotstxt.org

Provide An HTML Version of Your Sitemap
Providing an HTML Version that lists the links to the pages of your site can guide the search engine spiders to all of the pages of your site. If your navigation is currently in flash or javascript, this is a great alternative way of making sure the spiders find the site's pages. Make sure that your link to your sitemap is a simple "a href" tag, not a link formed with javascript or flash as the spiders will not be able to follow that type of link.

Using LinkedIn For SEO

Your LinkedIn profile can be an excellent source of SEO friendly links because:

• LinkedIn has great authority in Google
• Your website links can be given unique anchor text with the dofollow attribute
• Your LinkedIn profile can have highly relevant content relative to the websites you own

The 3 main things that every LinkedIn profile should have are:

1. A professional/personal picture of yourself.
   Don’t just upload an image of your dog/cat/fish/hamster/car/computer/world of warcraft, or any other beloved items. Be as transparent about who you are as you can. Sites like Twitter and others that don’t have a professional mindset don’t matter as much, but always have an image of something. If the site is geared toward professionals, err on the side of a professional picture.
2. As much information about yourself as you feel comfortable.
   At the very least, you should have a link to your personal or business website/blog. Also, you should write some really good compelling info about your current position, to make sure people know what it is you do, even though you might not be looking for a job, this helps put relevant content on your page.
3. A unique profile url for yourself if the option is available.
   This makes it easy for people to link to your profile, or find it again if they forget exactly how they found you. And if you put your name in your profile url, that makes it a little more SEO friendly for searches related to your name.

Comments!

Some Good SEO Resoruces

Tired of all the time and effort you consume for search engine optimization? Well try these tools:

• Google Keyword Tool: It is what it sounds like.
• Google Trends: Up and coming keyword trends.
• SEO Digger: A nifty little tool that shows what keywords you're currently ranking for on Google
• SEOMoz.org: An extensive collection of SEO articles, Q&A, and best practices - we have the paid subscription and it's worth every penny!
• SEOQuake: A must-have Firefox plugin.
• Search Engine Land: A good SEO blog.
• SearchStatus: A simple plugin that shows you Google and Alexa PageRank.
• SiteExplorer: Yahoo!'s indexing and linking statistics. This is a good general resource.
• WikiPedia's SEO article: A great place to start.
• WordTracker: An excellent keyword research tool.
• Advanced Web Ranking
• SEO Elite
• Market Samurai - Useful tool for researching keywords and SEO competition. Market Samurai plugs into several tools including Google’s keyword research tool.
• CopyScape
• Google Analytics

Share your favorite tools!

Some Bad SEO Ideas

Why SEO world is so complicated because it has changed dramatically over the past few years. What worked in 2003 stopped working in 2004. What worked in 2004 stopped working in 2005. The complexity of this environment, and the rapid changes, have led to many SEO myths. Following are few worst SEO ideas that must be avoided to grow your business for the long term.

1. Relying only on keyword metatags
2. Stuff keywords in invisible text
3. Purchase Links
4. Implementing duplicate contents
5. Use Session IDs on your URLs
6. Developing your site in Flash
7. Using lots of Javascript
8. Link Building with irrelevant sites

These are few points, you can share yours!

SEO for Firefox - Must-Have SEO Tool

There are some SEO tools you will have to pay for, while there are plenty of others that are totally free of charge; one of these free tools is SEO for Firefox. Not only is it free, but it is a plug-in. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about doing a major install. However, you must have the Firefox browser installed on your system before you can use this SEO tool. If you are concerned about security, SEO for Firefox is secure.

SEO for Firefox gives you vital information that goes beyond the website. For example, you can find out information such as the age of the website, its page ranking, links and data traffic. The tool also allows you to view pages that are indexed to Google. You can also find out whether the website is found in other directories.

Having this information is important because sites can be ranked due to their age or possession of many trusted links. For example, since the Internet was founded thanks to a government project, people find that both government (.gov) and educational (.edu) websites are inclined to have more credibility than commercial websites. All in all, SEO for Firefox gives you an overview of why the website is ranked the way it is.

Watch this video to know how it works?

SEO Link Building

Link popularity is the main factor major search engines use to rank web sites. This makes link building an integral part of any effective search engine optimization strategy. Watch this basic video on this.

Does your site adheres to current SEO best practices?

It is important that you check with some basic guidelines for good SEO practices. Usually more stuff is put on than it is expected (for a good optimized site) while working with any particular website. Following are few points of consideration, better to ask these questions to yourself before proceeding to some extensive SEO practice:

1. Are the keywords you're targeting relevant to site content?
2. Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engine queries?
3. Do page titles start with your targeted keywords?
4. Does your site employ H1 header tags for prominent content titles?
5. Is your permanent body copy contextually sufficient and keyword-rich?
6. Do text links include targeted keywords that point users to pages within your site?
7. Do you use CSS (define) image replacement in graphical navigation on the site?
8. Do graphics used in the site have descriptive, keyword-rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors?
9. Does your Web site have a site map with text links?
10. Do the URLs of your dynamic, database-driven pages look simple and static?
11. Does your site have a flat directory structure?
12. Do your site's home page and other key category pages have PageRanks?
13. Is your site listed in Open Directory?
14. Do you routinely list your site in other trusted, human-reviewed online directories?
15. Do all the pages in your Web site have keyword-rich meta descriptions?
16. Does your site have a custom error page?
17. Do the site's filenames and directory names include targeted keywords?
18. Does your site avoid using pop-ups?
19. Is the exact same content visible to both users and search engine spiders?
20. Do you avoid free-for-all linking offers?

Now if your answer is "Yes" to most of the questions listed above then your website is in a better condition. Working with these points is a straightforward approach to better visibility for your Web site in the major search engines.

List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website

This is really helpful, list contains important information regarding SEO practices. Visit this LINK. It contains a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.