The long answer involves exactly what it is that Google™ and search engines are looking for from social media.  You should be aware by now, that search engines spend an astounding amount of effort and resources analyzing the websites that link to your site.  The basic idea is that if your site is truly worthwhile and useful, other sites will link to it.  If no sites, few sites, or poor quality sites, link to you, then how useful could your site be?  How high you rank in search results today has vastly more to do with who links to you and how, than anything happening on your actual site.  In other words, search engines trust other sites to tell them about your site, more than they trust your site to tell them about your site.

In this mix of who links to you, search engines are looking for a surprising number of factors:

•    The diversity of types of sites that link to you (blogs, information sites, social sites, etc…)
•    The geography of sites that link to you
•    The quality of sites that link to you (based on the sites linking to them)
•    The diversity of top level domains linking to you (.com, .edu, .gov, .org, etc…)
•    The freshness of links to your site (recent links carry more weight than old ones)
•    And a dizzying array of other factors, including many technical factors

For a few years, Google has skirted the question of how much weight they put on links from social sites, but has recently (December 2010) disclosed that links from social sites like Twitter™ and FaceBook™ are trusted ranking signals (and while speculative, might have been ranking signals for long before Google admitted it).

How heavily do search engines rely on links from social sites?

Links from social sites, are certainly not the magic bullet.  However if your site has good links from many types of sites, but is under-represented in social sites, what does that say to search engines about your site?  If your site were really that good, wouldn’t there be lots of links from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube™, LinkedIn™, Delicious™, and others?   Because those links aren’t there, your site probably doesn’t rank as high as it should.

Furthermore, search engines are likely looking for a broad based coalition of users in those social services to link to you. In other words, you can’t fix the problem by simply creating a FaceBook fan page and dropping a link in it.  Nor by opening a twitter account and tweeting your URL.  The link from the fan page or twitter account will only have any value if search engines see fans and followers that make it authoritative.  And one account in a social site linking to you doesn’t say much.  Your site will rank better if there links from lots of real user accounts.

The good news is: with some simple and effective social media link building strategies, you can solve the problem and get a good link presence in social media sites with much less effort than you expect.

If you are concerned that you don’t have enough good quality links from social media sites, contact ibusolutions.com to request a free consultation.

Let’s say you want to search for a product or service on the web. You’ll go to a popular search engine, type in your search, and look at the first five results that come up.

These five companies or individuals have made sure they’re at the top of the list by using SEO – Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a highly effective way of driving traffic to your site, which is why it’s absolutely crucial to building a successful business.

For a new business, freelancer or budding startup, getting your product or service into the top 5 search results can be tricky. But the good news is, you can boost your own profile very easily by yourself.

All you need to understand is how SEO works. Think of it like this – how can you find out information about a person you don’t know? It’s simple – you meet the person, and you ask other people about the person. And that’s exactly what search engines do. They:

-Meet your website by analyzing your content and coding (on page optimization)

-Ask other sites about your site by analyzing back links to your site (off page optimization)

So where should you start? Let us help you! Here are our top tips for successful SEO.

1. Target the right customers – do your keyword research!

Most business people will agree that launching a business without prior market research reduces the odds of success. Well, the same goes in the online world, especially when it comes to SEO.

The key question is “What will my ideal customers search for when they are looking for my service / product online?” And the best way to find out is the Google AdWords tool:

- Type in the keywords that best represent your business and select your target market (geo location and language). Google will then suggest the most popular keywords searches related to the keyword(s) or phrases you’ve just typed.

-You’ll then see what your customers are searching for – and how many of them are searching for it. This allows you to choose the best keywords to target.

- After you have chosen your keywords, design a structure which allocates between 1 to 4 keywords for every “converting page” of your website. By “converting page”, I mean sub-page url’s which sell your product (i.e. you don’t want to rank pages like “Privacy Policy” or “Terms of Service” as customers don’t buy from those pages!). A good example is Altitude Shoes, who rank their main page for “elevator shoes”, “height shoes” and “height increasing shoes” but also use their other converting pages e.g. www.altitude-shoes.com/tall-mens-shoes.html AND www.altitude-shoes/taller-shoes.html to rank for other terms. But remember – more than 3 to 4 keywords per page may confuse search engines.

Golden Rule 2: Optimize Your Website

Once you have selected the relevant keywords, you need to tell search engines that your website is all about these words, and also make sure your website is easily accessible to search engines. How? By placing your keywords in the right spots.

Some of the methods below are a bit technical if you don’t have a working knowledge of HTML, so if it gets confusing, ask a tech savvy friend or developer for help.

-Put your keywords in your page title.

-Use the keywords that you are trying to optimize on your page, but don’t overuse them (1-2% in the body content is plenty).

-Put the keywords that you are trying to rank for in your headings (H1 tags)

-Make sure you have a sitemap.xml (you can download a good free sitemap generator at A1 Sitemap) and you have submitted it to Google Webmasters Tools.

-Deny search engines access to your admin or draft web page areas through your robots.txt file.

-Optimize your page loading speed by combining all your css and javascript files.

-Reduce the number of outgoing links on your pages, including creating what’s known as No Follow links.

As mentioned above, the above tricks can be quite technical and you may need an SEO Expert to advise you. There are lots of good services that can do this for you cost effectively.

Golden Rule 3: Tell The World About Your Website

Now that you know what keywords you want to rank for and have optimized your pages, it’s time to tell the world (and the search engines) about your business. The objective here is to get the maximum number of links back to your website.

Here are three simple ways to get back links:

a) Guest Blogging

This is a very easy technique you can apply to pretty much any niche – simply find bloggers writing about topics related to your topic and offer to write a high quality blog post for them in exchange for a link back to your site. Simple.

The result? You reach out to an audience that’s already interested in what you’re doing and get a high quality link for search engines.

b) Niche Directory Submission

These days, directory submissions are generally considered as low quality link building. But if you do a quick Google search and submit your website to directories specialized in your niche, this can be a great asset – Google rates relevancy.

The result? If a link to your site is placed on a website with topical correlation to yours, it can carry a lot of weight.

c) Social Media Marketing

The internet has evolved to revolve more and more around the sociosphere, which means that while once, social media links were seen as low quality, they’re now rising in profile. As head of Google spam Matt Cutts suggests, the key is not to spam links on your Facebook wall, but rather to find authorities on social media and convince them to tweet about your site, and share your link on their Facebook.

The result? It will help SEO and attract quality traffic to your site.

Remember – SEO is not a race! It will take 2 or 3 months for a new website to achieve and maintain meaningful search engine rankings – so don’t be tempted to spam thousands of links at once to your site (known as Black Hat SEO) or you may get blacklisted – and disappear from search engines altogether! Instead, follow the rules above, and you could double or triple your profit within 3 months. Yay!

However, nonprofits also need to understand how design and usability affects their revenue. Nonprofits are interested in many of the same things that businesses are: increasing revenue, building trust, and reaching the right audience.

For some reason, many nonprofits seems to skimp on marketing and communications because they feel that they need to do everything on a shoestring budget just because of their nonprofit status. I believe that the opposite is true and that nonprofits should be especially conscious of investing in the right tools for marketing successfully.

So how does a nonprofit use the web to grow? Here are a few ways.

Invest in great design. Website visitors make snap judgments about your organization based on the quality of your website. If your website looks outdated, cheap, and unprofessional, what assurance do I have that my donation will be used effectively?

Invest in quality content. Many nonprofit websites have very little content or poorly-written content on their websites. Your website must tell a story for donors, volunteers, and the media. Make sure researchers can find the information they need to understand your mission.

Don’t be afraid to ask for money. Many nonprofit websites seem to forget that they need money and for some reason make it very difficult to make a donation. Be sure that you accept online donations via credit card. The donation button should be easy to find and easy to use. Remove barriers to making a donation and giving will increase.

Understand your audiences. Nonprofits need to target multiple audiences: donors, volunteers, sponsors, and the media. Be sure your nonprofit website has the right tools for all these groups. The media will want press releases and press kits. Volunteers will want clear job descriptions and specifications. Donors will want easy ways to give and will want to know how their money is being used. Event sponsors want to be able to sign up quickly online.

Keep content fresh. Nonprofit websites need to pay special attention to how current website content is. Interested parties want to see that your organization is making a difference and that your mission is current. Blogs and press releases are a great way to tell your story and keep your message fresh. If possible, update content at least once a week.

It’s tempting to try to design and maintain a nonprofit website on the cheap, but this does a disservice to your mission. By investing in a high-quality web presence, your nonprofit will actually become more successful in the long run and attract more donations, sponsors, and volunteers.

Won’t this help you make a difference?

So how do you get more traffic to your website? It’s not easy, but it’s also not as difficult as you might think. Here are some simple ways to do it.

1. Blog consistently. Blogging has a number of SEO benefits and the more content you create via your blog, the more content the search engines will gobble up. Blogging on a weekly basis (or even more often) using strategic keywords can increase the amount of traffic you receive over time.

2. Place your website URL on everything you publish. This may seem obvious but I see lots of organizations that seem to forget this. Brochures, billboards, email signatures, pens, business cards, and anything else that you publish should list your website address prominently.

3. Make it easy to share your content. Many websites publish great content on their blogs, but lack the tools to make it easy to share on social networks. Make sure your content has social widgets and social commenting available to make it easier for others to share it.

4. Publish an email newsletter. Your email newsletter should contain useful information that benefits your constituents. Within that newsletter, you can include subtle links to additional content on your website.

5. Make your website an interactive tool. Many organizations are still stuck in the mindset of doing business using paper forms and documents. Convert as much paperwork as possible to online forms and your constituents will get used to seeing your website as a resource. If your customers can pay bills and manage their information via your website, you will see more traffic and have more opportunities to communicate with them.

Getting more traffic to your website is typically a good thing. It gives you a bigger audience to talk to and increases awareness of your organization. The next step is, of course, converting those visitors into prospects.

What are some ways you increase traffic to your website? I would love to hear your comments below.

Please let me know  if there is anything I can help you with.

Thank you so much,
Evan