Twitter has recently become a huge way to meet and follow people or businesses. People can tweet where they are going or new things they wish to share to people. Companies can show links of their company featured on other websites. This will show followers that they are legit and they may continue to follow if they are interested. Twitter can be a very good way to break news in their industry. Being the first one will raise awareness and gain a lot of interest for their business. Companies can also use Twitter as a way to offer discounts or special offers for customers who find them via social media.

Twitter is not only for people to show interest in your company, but it is also a great way to learn about your industry and things competitors are doing. A company can learn from others’ mistakes on what to do and what not to do. Twitter allows people to track conversations, so you can always be updated. This will allow companies to know when it is their turn to maybe go for a potential customer. You can find out who your competitors are talking to and do some competitive intelligence, as Twitter likes to call it. Instead of crappy flyers or calling someone who obviously doesn’t want to speak to you, you can slowly build relationships through your Twitter. Sometimes you don’t even have to do anything. Twitter allows people to follow your page and keep up with new updates.

Twitter allows small businesses to get out of their shell and be themselves. They can put what they want whenever they want to. Potential customers stay interested because Twitter allows businesses to branch out to anyone. Businesses can hold weekly Twitter chats to get advice or talk to others in the industry. Twitter allows people to stay on top of their game and never fall behind. Small businesses can learn from others and expand. Normal marketing still works, but online outlets can be very helpful.

Four-square is another way for small businesses to grow. Are you a start-up business trying to advertise your new specials? Are you a customer simply wanting to know what restaurants around in your area can get you the best deals? Do you just want credit for going to the same restaurant every day? If you answered yes to any of these questions then Foursquare might be for you. Foursquare not only provides loyalty programs for its customers, but it also helps provide promotion through social media. Combine that with the ability to track your customer base, and Foursquare has the potential the change the world of e-commerce.

Facebook is another great way to expand your business. Facebook has advertising that goes on different peoples pages based on their likes and dislikes. Can local businesses utilize Facebook? Or is it just a waste of time? For many smaller local business Facebook can be one way, and a very useful way, to spread information throughout the community. One of the important ideas to think about when trying to market through Facebook is the targeted age group. Facebook mainly caters to the younger, college crowd. Out of all the users of Facebook, the 18-25 year olds serve as the highest percentage of users in the United States. But, the amount of users over the age of 35 are growing at a very rapid pace, within the past . Facebook can change small businesses, just as with Twitter and Foursquare.

Our client whocanisue.com was having in indexation problem after a shift over to a new CMS.  While still ranking very high for their well converting keywords they went from about a 70% IR (Indexation Rate) to an IR of about 20 percent over 120 days post New CMS. Although it seems very  commonsensical, whocanisue.com had the standard subfolder structure with a deep page hierarchy that we felt may have been making it difficult to get all the pages indexed. After confirming our theory with SEOMoz and their post about how flattening your site could yield better indexation results we put it to the test.

Less than one month after migrating 1800 pages of content into 140 subdomains we have found that we have 1710 pages indexed for an IR of 95%. Additionally, our search engine traffic increased 7% over the same time frame. Although some of our keywords dropped position on a nominal level we now have more pages indexed which are resulting in far more keywords appearing in search querys.

We are elated by this move as is our client. It’s important to understand that if your goals are to make the user experience better, chances are Google and the other big Search engines will take note and help you out.

1. If an enduser ends up at a 404 on your site they may get confused and leave your site.
2. Google likes URL’s and links that actually link somewhere. Overtime google may stop indexing the page the URL is pointing to.

How do you know if you have a 404 problem?

If you have webmaster tools, it will actually tell you what pages are resulting in a 404 and if you don’t, it’s actually pretty simple. Let’s say your domain name is www.dogdayafternoon.com, just add any obscure word or phrase after your domain like www.dogdayafternoon.com/i-fly-kites. It will most likely see something along the lines of page not found or 404 error.

How do solve this problem?

First, make sure your link’s are pointing to the right URL’s. Secondly, you want to create a 404 error page like our client whocanisue.com. Some site’s get creative and funny. It’s recommended that you have links on your 404 page that act almost as a sitemap to your most important pages, that way your enduser doesn’t cut and run, but knows that you understand there is a problem and they can start over or be guided through another path.

Digital Footprint can help you with any of your Search Engine Optimization needs. Contact us today.

Google Buzz is just like facebook, you follow people, they follow you, you create a status update, upload videos and pics and then your followers can comment.  I personally find it more efficient to have everything in one place. The problem is getting everyone else to move over to gmail. I’ll do my best.

Not having these redirects can be fatal to a website, from an indexation standpoint. Let’s say you were a small website with 500 URL’s and you had 385 indexed. If you were to completely restructure your url system, without 301 redirects. Overtime, Google and the other major search engines would stop displaying your URL’s as they would most likely return a 404 error.

Let’s use the example of a made up boat company xyzboatco.com. We decide to make our structure more effective with less folders and change xyzboatco.com/boats/engine/speed to xyzboatco.com/speed-boat-engines. If your initial URL was on the first page of Google and you didn’t redirect it to the later URL, overtime Google would drop that link. Google would still be sending traffic to the old link and it would result in a 404 error, which is an SEO no no.

If you are considering a URL overhaul it is absolutely imperative that you create a 301 redirect for your website, so you don’t lose all the hard work that you have put into your site.

After converting one of their extremely confused, annoyed, and down right pissed off PPC clients into one of ours, I had some info gathering to do. What was the service, what was their pitch, and how did they talk potential clients into their pay per click campaign? So I actually called yellowpages and told them that I needed help running one of my campaigns cause I was just too busy and yellowpages sent out a sales rep and a Search Engine Marketing Manager. This is what transpired:

Service Highlights:

• onypc.com (yellowpages) manages your campaign in Atlanta
• PPC Campaign is spread among many major search engines; Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc..
• Choose a comfortable monthly budget
• Cool Online Portal for Transparency
• onypc Landing Page
• 12 month contract (NO OUT)

Major Onypc.com (Yellowpages) Flaws:

• With onypc.com (yellowpages) you don’t actually get to speak with the campaign manager, you work with a Search Engine Marketing “Manager” that probably has never managed a PPC account.
• I had the rebuttal, that if I knew Google converted at twice the rate of the other search engines, and was the same relative Cost per Click (CPC), why would I be forced to display ads on less effective search engines. The response was, “We have you covered on 92% of the Search Engines, why would you only want to be covered on 72% of the searches!” Really, who was this guy kidding? I have been managing $100,000+  monthly PPC campaigns for over 3 years. It’s common advertising sense to appropriate your spend to the medium that converts at the highest rate and lowest cost.
• Cool Backend Portal; this was the biggest selling point for them (very sad.) Apparently this offers transparency, which is very important to someone investing money in advertising. With the portal you can see how many clicks you had and how much you spent, with one very important metric excluded, the cost that yellowpages paid for that click.
• How much Does yellowpages make? We all know that there is an inherent cost for a click. There are various models out there for pay per click but typically there is a one time setup fee and then a monthly management fee relative to the monthly PPC spend. Only yellowpages has a far different model, for this example you (Painting Professional) would give yellowpages $2500 and they would show you 80 clicks in the report on your cool back-end portal. Doing simple math you know you spent just over $31 per click, seems ok right?  Absolutely not!!! Only If you are a personal injury lawyer specializing in Mesothelioma.
• Obviously you have to get paid for services rendered, but if you are only paying $3 a click on Google and charging them $31 per click, that’s strong armed robbery. I asked how do I know that I’m not getting ripped off? Response. “We’re Yellowpages.” hahahah, riiiiiight!
• A Landing Page? check this out  S & J Roofing. From an Analytics standpoint you are dealing with a limited # of page views and time on site, why would you want another obstacle up to keep you from securing a client? I have no clue either. It is no wonder that their clients hate them.
• Agreement Length = 12 Months. So after everything is said and done, we have ripped you off, stolen your money, landed the potential clients that you over paid for on our site, and now we are locking you in for 12 months!

My fellow readers! I scream SCAMMMMMM. Please do yourselves a favor, do not spend your money with onypc.com (yellowpages) they are giving the SEM and more specifically PPC world a bad name. If you are interested in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where we land your potential clients on  your website,  show you what the clicks cost on Google, and then focus on increasing your conversions overtime please contact Digital Footprint Media.

To preface this post, I love facebook, have plenty of friends, and access it on my computer at work and home, and regularly on my iPhone. Being involved with Search Engine Marketing for the past 3 years and kind of specializing in PPC. I must say I am less than impressed.

I just thought I should share what one weeks worth of data looks like from one of our clients whocanisue.com, their site focuses on educating the public on the validity of a legal claim, then after answering a few questions you are shown a list of local attorneys that can help you with your specific matter.

I’m feeling just a little bragadocious, about 8 weeks ago we took over all marketing for whocanisue.com. We just redesigned their website and launched it 3 weeks ago, run all of their traditional media campaigns (South FL) and all of their Search Engine Marketing. Whocanisue.com converts at an avg. of about 13% and closer to 18% in South Fl which is astonishing, so I’ll pat myself on the back for our team that has done a bang up job but now we’ll focus on why I have your attention, Facebook.com.

You want targeting? Sorry, not gonna happen, you can choose demographics but what really matters is the relevance to your ads and your service. Why can’t I target my ads to someone that just wrote in his/ her status that they got a DUI or just got in a car wreck?  Don’t know, you’ll have to ask facebook.com. Oh wait, they don’t ever respond to any questions unless you email them 4 times regarding the same matter.

Now that I’ve had time to vent, lets look at the data taken from  ONE WEEK of traffic, via Google Analytics:

Analytics Visits - Facebook.com (click to view full size)

In this time period facebook.com advertising accounted for over 10% of our traffic, yet Avg. Pages/Visit,  Time on Site, and Bounce rate were staggeringly AWFUL against our site average for each metric discussed. Before I continue, let’s check out conversions:

Analytics Conversions for Facebook.com (click to view full size)

Again, for the same time period. The traffic that Facebook.com barely converted and against our site avg. and top traffic sources there was no competetion.

Thoughts: Facebook should try displaying ads based on relevancy. I don’t know, maybe use the rich content you have available from your users.  Ultimately, someone advertising in the age of tracking and measurability will most definitely appropriate their ad spend to the medium or mediums that convert at the highest rate and for the lowest cost and unfortunately for facebook, we had to pull our ad spend.