Although sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are all incredibly popular options for social media, it is wise to examine your intended use and fit that use with the right site when planning your marketing strategy. There are many success stories with each possibility, such as the story about Pizza Hut using Twitter essentially as a cross between customer service and marketing, but today’s article by Doug Caverly, entitled “New Twitter Stats Highlight Lack of Stickiness” show trends in social marketing that shouldn’t be ignored.

The crux of the article is that many people and businesses sign up for Twitter and either never use it or use it a few times. Even more concerning is that some accounts have never taken the time to build a network of followers on Twitter. Here are the bare statistics that have come to light:

- At the end of 2009, there were 75 million Twitter accounts, with July being the peak month for increased membership
- Each month 6.2 million new accounts are activated (2-3 per second)
- 25% of accounts have no followers
- 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet
- 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times

These are grave statistics for Twitter to consider, and surely, there will be growth in the future and changes to address the underlying issues that may be contributing to the statistics that show a large number of users either give up on it before they really get started or just fail to build any network on the site at all. Still, with the growth rate that Twitter is maintaining, there’s no need to throw your hands up and walk away. The fact is that lots of users are employing Twitter: if you just flip around the statistic on how many people are not using Twitter more than 10 times to find the 20% that are using it repeatedly, we see that 15 million users are tweeting. That’s still a respectable number.

For now when assessing your online marketing strategies, it is important to be aware of some of the limitations of social media. It’s not just up to Twitter to fix itself, but up to us to know how we will use these tools effectively. Working creatively with sites like Twitter and Facebook can gain your business followers and sales, but it will still be work to get a network up and running. They won’t run on their own and they do need regular attention. Internet marketing experts can guide you through this process, which may be the edge needed for your business to gain ground in this new realm of marketing.

Every so often while I am reading SEO news, I find something that tickles my funny bone. This morning, it was an article about Bill Gates’ blog and the SEO tactics that are either missing or need improvement on his site. I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary, but better still, Danny Sullivan, author of “Some SEO Advice for Bill Gates” brings some good tips to light by using Gates’ site as an example. Although Sullivan digs much deeper, today I’d like to highlight two aspects of web page design that can increase your search ratings if they are improved: titles and meta-description tags.

Like many blogs and web pages, Bill Gates’s blog does not come out on the top of the heap when searched through Google. Shockingly, Bing doesn’t even rank this site in the top 10. Sullivan points out that although it is in the top 10 on Google, there are parody blogs ahead of him in the rankings.

Here are some of the main points I’d like to bring to your attention about titles:

1. Include the most obvious title for your page in the title text. In Gates’ case the sites that outranked him in Sullivan’s search did so because they had titles that said “Bill Gates Blog”. You might think that this phrase is too obvious to put in the title text, but it will drive up the site’s rankings. Sometimes it is about the obvious.

2. Each page on your website should have its own title, as this will provide another opportunity to be found by search engines. A little research on keywords can go a long way to increasing your site’s ranking if you include the top keywords used to get to your site in your title text.

3. Think of your website’s title as another opportunity to brand yourself and your business, but remember to combine branding with the top known keywords for maximum results.

4. Adding the word “official” to a website or blog can help rankings in certain situations. In the case of the Bill Gates site, it could make his blog stand out in the crowd of search results if he includes “official” in his title.

Sullivan’s information on meta description tags is also valuable. He points out that if you do not fill in your own information for your website, then “what shows is likely to change depending on the exact search someone does that brings up your home page. Usually, Google and Bing will try to automatically form a description based on what someone enters.” Meta description tags – which are done by – are another way for you to brand your own site and speak for your site, business, or person.

These are small things that can increase your site’s visibility, but small things do add up in SEO. If Bill Gates doesn’t have a handle on them, then there is a chance that your own website could do with a little tweaking too.

Late last week women on Facebook began posting their bra colours. The aim of the game was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer. And, indeed, the creator of the Facebook group called What’s Your Bra Color??? promised to donate $500 to Susan G. Komen’s foundation for the Cure if that group had more than 1,000 members by this past Monday. The casual campaign to post bra colours has garnered media attention and netted the What’s Your Bra Color??? Facebook group 4,500 members.

Some critics claim that the meme is only a pointless flirtation device, aimed at teasing men. Others claim that we are all already aware of breast cancer. While still others, including Susan G. Komen, praise the action, saying anything that gets people talking about and thinking about breast cancer is a boon. And it did get attention! The fact that the colours have vanished from Facebook statuses, but there is still talk about whether it worked or not is proof that it got people talking.

Regardless of your stance on this particular rash of Facebook posts, the deeper awareness for SEO and internet marketing gurus is a reminder of the deep reach that social media now employs in our society. If a post about bra colour has received this kind of attention, both on Facebook and from the media at large, it is worth talking about social media as a tool for attention for your business.

We’ve talked about the importance of social media within your marketing campaign before, but it bears repeating with this kind of example of its potential impact at our feet.

One big aspect of social media is that it is a new spin on the old adage about word-of-mouth being the best sales tool out there. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the electronic versions of word-of-mouth. Although there is some time and energy taken in setting up and maintaining accounts, when your business takes off in these electronic spaces the word-of-mouth rule begins to apply. The bra colour campaign is a perfect example of how well a focused, fun idea can capture the attention of a social media group, sell that idea, then result in action. It’s a perfect business marketing model. The next time a business tells me that they are hesitant to employ social media in their marketing plans, I am definitely going to use this example to show them that social media can get people talking about your business and products.

Now, I have to go and find an old picture to post, pick up the closest book and pick a sentence to post in my status, and make sure my settings are set properly. Social media really is all what you make of it!

As someone with a vested interest in SEO tactics, I’m always interested in what the official word is from the biggest players on the scene. Namely, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo. Every so often their officials put information out there that especially catches my attention.

I like the way linking works. It fascinates me that linking can help to build your ranking on Google. As much as I try to wrap my brain around it, there is always another caveat and always something new to learn about this technique. It’s a little like editing the English language: just when you think you have all of the exceptions and rules figured out, something else crops up to dig into and to consider. Basically, I like it because I learn something new all the time and there is always a curve ball somewhere. Not everyone finds these sorts of things entertaining, but suffice it to say that those of us who do are incredibly entertained by Google and linking.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google, answering the question: “Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

Chris Crum covers this video in his article “How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter”, and he and Matt both basically tell us that Facebook and Twitter links are ranked the same way as every other link out there. Matt Cutts goes so far as to pointedly say that Google’s search criteria does not discriminate based on platform. A link is a link is a link in the world of Google searches.

This claim does have a bit of a caveat to it (it’s those exceptions that tickle me so much) in that Facebook pages can have private settings. When a Facebook page is not public, Google cannot crawl it or rank it. And most links on Twitter are nofollowed anyway, which changes their interaction with Google.

So, if you thought that a .ed or a .gov website would carry more weight in the rankings, you’ve now been reassured straight our of the mouths of Goggle that their search techniques just don’t work that way.

We’re a household that loves gadgets. I work in SEO and my husband is a programmer. Gadgets are the backbone of our lives. Our kids were barely upright when they began trying to poke at our computers and bang on the laptop keys. So you can imagine that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been a hot topic in our world.

Chris Crum gives a nice overview of the gadgets of the year in his article “A Glimpse of this Year’s Upcoming Gadgets”. From new products in televisions and blue-ray players to touch notebooks and e-readers, there really is something to appeal to everyone at CES. I know a number of non-technical people who will be excited about the developments in television related products, while the more technically oriented are drooling over the latest and greatest computer gadgets. It’s a wide range.

As an SEO aficionado, there were a few releases that caught my eye on Chris Crum’s list:

- Microsoft and HP combining their efforts and providing Bing as the default search engine with MSN as the default homepage for HP PCs in 42 countries.
- Intel’s new family of processors.
- Palm’s updates to their webOS platform.
- Yahoo’s announcements of their new hardware partnerships.
- The availability of professional service options for the Cisco Eos social entertainment platform.
- A new browser release for Opera.
- RIM’s newest BlackBerry achievement: a presenter that can show PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, etc straight from a BlackBerry device.
- Ford’s Internet-ready vehicles.

Some of these announcements are changes in the way computers work. Updated webOs platforms, new processors, and bigger and better BlackBerries can change how much we do online, how fast the experience can be, and the flexibility of our computers, regardless of their size. SEO takes interest in these developments so we can try to predict the next big changes in the way we use the Internet and how businesses access the Internet.

Other announcements, like Internet-ready vehicles, provide opportunities to expand our Internet usage and provide growth in markets like the developing mobile website marketplace. And still others have the potential to shift search engine market share, like the deal between Microsoft and HP that will expand Bing’s exposure, or swing social networking to a newer forum; both of which can have a big impact on SEO strategies.

Of course, while all of these new gadgets and releases are fun to look at and speculate about, only time will tell what will take hold of the marketplace and what will fizzle out. Right now, we’re all just looking and making notes to keep an eye on some of these developments

Now that the presents are opened and the left-over turkey is being made into sandwiches, we’re all slowly moving on to preparations for the New Year. Although resolutions are sometimes done alone, they can be done on a bigger level. In our family, we often take time to talk about what we would like to do and see in the coming year as a family.

It makes sense to think about making resolutions – a pretty fancy word for plans – for your business too. If your business is a small one, a breakfast meeting with some brainstorming and then making a few concrete plans may do the job. Bigger businesses will require input from different groups across the company and several meetings, but the end result of these resolution meetings is the same: brainstorming and planning. Regardless of the size of your company and scope of your SEO resolution project, the beginning of a new year provides an opportunity to figure out what worked in the past, what needs improvement, and what new projects ought to be tackled now.

Duane Forrester focused on resolutions in his article “6 New Years Resolutions for In-House SEMs”. He suggests starting with these steps:

- Hold an internal SEO summit: from a small breakfast meeting to a catered day or two with several speakers, this is the opportunity to talk about different aspects of your online strategy, uncovering the positive and negative attempts of the past year, and proposing projects for the new year. You never know where the best suggestions will come from, so keep an open mind when issuing invitations to this meeting.
- Get Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml docs in place: your business wants to let engine crawlers know how to interact with your site and how to access your freshest content, which is what robots.txt and sitemap.xml docs do. If your company has these documents on your website, be sure to update them. If they are not on your website, now is the time to get them up.
- Open and use Webmaster accounts: Bing, Yahoo, and Google offer contact with their search engines through dedicated Webmaster accounts. As Forrester explains, ”These accounts provide a wide range of services from alerting the engines to updates on your site to feedback directly from the engines themselves around how they are interacting with your website.”
- Establish the ROI on SEO investment: determining your ROI (return on investment) for your SEO strategy is not a straight calculation. Figure out what has been done, what increases your business has see through your web presence, and go from there.
- Integrate SEO and Social Media efforts: link building is a complex effort, which is propelled forward with your social media endeavors, so don’t leave social media out of your resolutions.
- Schedule and hold a senior executive-level SEO review: be sure to get your company executives on board, as they will help you move your SEO strategy across different levels of the company effectively.

Don’t let mobile websites be your business’ telephone banking blind spot.

The other day, I was thinking about how slow I was to adopt online banking. It took nothing for me to go to telephone banking, but my mindset was stuck there for years. I knew about online banking, but my mentality was very much “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. I liked telephone banking and it did everything I wanted it to do, so why bother? Then I switched over to online banking and I realizedI had a telephone banking blind spot.

Sometimes the way we use technology is just like telephone banking. It seems like it will do all you want it to do, you’re comfortable with it, and there is no impetus for change. I get that, because I’ve been there. I’ve looked at a new development and thought “Cool, but my (insert whatever you want here) works just fine, so why make the switch?”

Except that in business it is never that easy. Technology is proving that it can make or break a business, especially in tight economic times. And technology can change the way we all interact with each other; Twitter and Facebook have changed how we keep in touch with our friends and they are now morphing into fabulous business tools. As entrepreneurs, we all have to take these lessons to heart. No need to be the last business on the block to take up the mantle of new technologies.

Mobile websites are just such an animal.

With the growth of mobile devices and a growing segment of the population using mobile devices to access the internet, mobile websites promise to grow too. Joshua Odmark wrote about this promise and explains some of the potential for business growth in his article “Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile”.

Here are the 10 reasons he states:

1. Google has a separate index for mobile content.
2. Your regular website is not going to cut it.
3. 1/5 of Americans access the mobile web each day.
4. Mobile web will overtake the desktop within 5 years.
5. $1.6 billion purchased from mobile devices in 2009.
6. 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone.
7. 5% of the top 500 online retailers have a mobile website/iPhone app.
8. Mobile advertising spending will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012.
9. Users average 13 hours online per week, up from 7 in 2002.
10. There are an estimated 2 billion cell phones worldwide.

With this growing market at your fingertips, your business can adopt mobile website development, and it could even influence how the mobile web scene will grow over the next few years.