The two most important elements that qualify companies to promote themselves as SEO experts are competence and professionalism. And the way you find out if a company is competent and professional, as well as legitimate, is to do your due diligence and check their credentials thoroughly, by exercising good old common sense and following these steps:

1. Verify Their Contact Information

If the company provides a street address, Google it to see if it’s a real address. If they provide a telephone number, call the number to see if it’s answered by the company or an answering service. If they don’t provide a telephone number, walk away. SEO is serious business. You need to have the ability to talk to whomever is going to be handling your account. You need to be able to ask questions, and you have a right to expect your questions to be answered in a professional manner. 2. Talk to Previous Customers
If the SEO company publishes testimonials on their website, contact a few of their customers and get their feedback. If the company can’t provide testimonials, walk away, or if the testimonials don’t have contact information, they’re probably bogus. Walk away.

3. Visit Reputable SEO Forums

Visit reputable SEO forums like Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Forum to find out what forum members have to say about the company. If an SEO company has a bad reputation, it will race across the Internet at warp speed. Conversely, if a company has a good reputation, you will find that out also.

4. Check Their Better Business Bureau Record

Most companies who are members of the BBB post it on their website with a link to their record. Check their record to see if they have any complaints, but don’t panic if the company has complaints. All companies receive complaints from time to time. What you want to find out is whether or not the company has an inordinate amount of complaints, and how those complaints have been handled.

5. Check Them Out with Their State’s Attorney General’s Office

If the company is located in the United States, check them out with their state’s Attorney General’s Office, Division of Consumer Affairs. All companies aren’t members of the BBB so often unhappy or dissatisfied customers will file a report with the AG’s office to get satisfaction.

6. Check Them Out with Local Police Agencies

Before you give a company your hard-earned money, do your due diligence. In addition to checking them out with the BBB and AG, put a call into the police department in their city to see if they’re involved in fraudulent activities. You’d be surprised how cooperative many police agencies are when it comes to fighting fraud in their city.

7. Check Them Out with Online Scam Watch Sites

Like I mentioned a moment ago, if an SEO company has a bad reputation, it will race across the Internet at warp speed. If a company is ripping people off, someone will know about it. Before parting with your hard-earned money, always check companies out with various online scam watch sites like Scam.com.

8. Avoid Companies That Send You Unsolicited E-Mail (spam)

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times, legitimate companies don’t send unsolicited e-mail. They don’t send sp@m. Do you know what kind of companies send sp@m? Scam artists intent on ripping you off, that’s who. The best thing to do when you receive sp@m is delete it. Don’t open it, don’t read it, don’t consider it…delete it!

9. Avoid Companies That Aren’t Ranked Competitively

If an SEO company doesn’t have the ability to secure a competitive ranking for their own site, then how on earth can they secure a competitive ranking for yours? Answer: They can’t. While far from perfect, sites like Alexa can give you a fair idea about a site’s ranking.

10. Don’t Make a Hasty Decision

Choosing the right SEO company is critical to the success of your company, so you want to make sure you get it right. Take your time and leave no stone unturned as you do your due diligence. Don’t rush the process, and walk away from companies that try to pressure you into making a quick decision.

11. How Long Has the Company Been Around?

When choosing an SEO company, the length of time they’ve been in business matters. A company’s longevity is a good indication of stability and how good they are at what they do. When it comes to SEO companies, the longer they’ve been in business the better.

12. Have They Written Articles About SEO?

Ask if anyone from their staff have written any articles that have been published on reputable websites. Has anyone on their staff written any books? Do they speak at major SEO conferences? Are they moderators at SEO/SEM forums? All of these things are indicators of professionalism, reputation and expertise.

13. Read the Contract

Don’t sign any contract until you’ve read and completely understood its terms. Better yet, let your attorney look over the contract. Contracts can be tricky, so it’s best to let a professional check things out. It’s too late to read the contract after the fact.

In this day and age, technology is constantly evolving. Everyday we are inundated with new features, new interfaces and improved designs that can sometimes make our head spin. Facebook is not exempt from this either and has undergone a lot of major transformations over the past several years. Just recently, Facebook has made some major modifications to its features, and whether you’re a fan or not, they are here to stay.

Combined News Feed Layout

One feature that Facebook has changed is its news feed layout. Before, you had two feeds: your “Top News” and “Most Recent News,” depending on its relevance to your interests. Also, if you only checked Facebook occasionally, you wouldn’t see anything about activities that happened a week ago. Now, the most interesting stories will always be displayed at the top and you won’t have to worry about missing anything important.

Additionally, prior to this change, you had to scroll down quite a bit just to see what people posted the day before. If your business heavily relies on social media, then this may have been a little labor intensive. But now with the combined news feed, your news stories are more customizable and will save you time in the long run.

Ability to Subscribe to News

With Facebook’s new subscription feature, you get to control the information you see from fríends or businesses. You can now subscribe to see all updates, most updates, or only important updates. Facebook’s blog explains that if you select to see all updates from someone, then you will see everything that person posts, if you select most updates, then you will see the same amount of posts that you are used to, and if you select important updates only, then Facebook will only show you important highlights once in a while. This can be beneficial for businesses since you can now elect to see all posts from certain people. This can save you a lot of time since you won’t have to remember to check out various pages throughout the day – all the information you want to see will be automatically siphoned through your personal news feed.

Live News Ticker

This feature gives you real time updates from people as it happens live on the web. If your fríend comments on someone else’s status, you get to see it right away. It gives you greater visibility as to what is happening throughout your Facebook community, as opposed to just seeing major news stories that are featured in your news feed. If one of your friends likes another friend’s status that you aren’t friends with, you still get to see this activity without having to visit either of their pages. This can be helpful for businesses because now all your Facebook friends get to see your recent activity regardless if they visit your page or not. They always have the option to unsubscribe, but chances are, if they are friends with you, then they will want to see what you are posting or “liking.”

Improved “Smart” Lists for Friends

This enhancement can be compared to the “circles” feature that Google+ offers. On Google+, you can add people to various “circles” based on your relationship with them. If you are a business, you can separate people into various groups such as current clients, potential clients, or colleagues. That way, you can choose to share information with certain groups of people. Facebook now offers a similar feature that allows you to add people to various lists. While this feature existed before, Facebook now has several predetermined “smart lists” that were created by analyzing your profile and basing them on your work or educational history. Friends are automatically added to co-worker or family lists so that you don’t have to spend time manually adding them.

Will Facebook Ever Stay the Same?

With the “real time ticker” and transformed news feed, these new features have made Facebook a lot more complicated. Evolutionary features such as the ability to share pictures, update your status, and chat live with friends make it hard to remember what Facebook used to be like. While many people are unhappy about the recent changes, in the end, most of the enhancements will save us a lot of time. If time equals money, then this can only be a good thing. In just a short period of time we will all get used to the new features, and most of us will probably grow to love them. Though, it will probably happen just in time for it all to change, once again.

If you write for a blog or update content on a regular basis, then you understand the importance of optimizing for SEO. With Wordtracker you can discover keywords which are popular, and it will also track the amount you’re using as you write your article, or update other forms of content.

Web videos have many purposes: they display, present, inform, educate, enlighten, and entertain; they also persuade, motivate, and sell.

Marketing videos can serve any one of these purposes, or they can serve all of them. What is important is the audience remembers the message and the company that delivers it. Without penetrating the audience’s consciousness and making an indelible impression, the resources invested are wasted. Of course the lasting impression you impart must serve your branding and sales objectives.

Creating effective marketing videos entails a lot of creative skills in order to take a self-serving business message and make it not just palatable but memorable. To begin, you need a concept, script, performers, and technical expertise in video, editing, and sound design; as well as the psychological insight to understand, and the creative ability to manipulate, emotional reactions while emphasizing key points.

Knowing how to implement those kinds of subliminal mnemonic memory triggers is essential; after all, if your audience doesn’t remember your message you’ve wasted their time and yours.

Defining The Message

Defining your marketing message seems like a simple task but in reality it’s one of the hardest questions for entrepreneurs to answer in a clear concise manner: the core ingredient needed to build an effective video marketing campaign.

We all take pride in our businesses, that’s only natural; and we all love to tell people we are the best or the cheapest, or that we offer the most features, but as nice as all of that sounds, these are not credible concepts to build a campaign around.

In order to define your core message you must go deeper into the psychological impact your product or service provides. The Maslowian advantage you present is what creates the motivation to purchase; all the other benefits are merely justification for an emotionally based decision.

Developing the Campaign Concept

Once you understand what you’re really selling, it’s time to develop a presentation concept. The best ideas are the ones that can sustain a campaign so that each new variation builds on the preceding ones.

TD Canada Trust for example, uses two old crotchety seniors reminiscent of the two Muppet balcony curmudgeons to deliver the bank’s message. The features presented are mostly irrelevant, as any that turnout to be successful will quickly be copied by the competition. The key to the success and longevity of the campaign is the two pensioners who humanize an otherwise sterile corporate monolith that people have trouble relating to.

Using Multimedia To Communicate

When you meet someone for the first time, you want to make a good impression. You wouldn’t show-up for a meeting with a new client wearing the same clothes you used to wash your car. Of course you’d put on decent clothes and make yourself presentable; it’s natural to want to be viewed favorably. But here comes the problem, just because you want to be viewed favorably and you do what you think is appropriate, doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. It’s the subliminal details and subtleties of a presentation that make a difference between success and failure.

The Web’s natural remoteness makes it even harder to connect with an audience, which in turn, makes it harder to persuade that audience to respond to your message. It doesn’t take much to turn people off. The wrong tie, a bad haircut, a dress that doesn’t fit, or even a distracting ‘tchotchke’ in the background can send your audience to the competition.

On the Web, people are sitting a foot away from the screen staring intently at the images you’re presenting, and they better be communicating the right message both directly and indirectly.

Mnemonic Memory Triggers

When it comes to Web video, every presentation element is magnified, and if you don’t know how to control each and every mnemonic memory trigger, the result will be instantly forgettable at best and disastrous at worst.

1. Colorful Focused Scripts

You need a script! There aren’t too many people who can just ‘wing-it.’ Even the best so-called ad-libs are usually well scripted in advance. Your script is the heart of your message and most business videos fail before they even start because the script lacks character, focus, and style. Even the best actor can’t do much with a lame script and the results can be even worse when you combine a bad script with the company president’s poor delivery.

Even a great script will fail if the performance is subpar. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, ‘A good script is how people speak, with the boring parts taken out.’ In other words, it’s how people would like to speak, but don’t.

The script should focus on the one main point you want your audience to remember because that is all they’re going to remember anyway. Too many ideas all at once only confuse the viewer. If you have to make more points, make more videos. Once your audience is hooked they’ll want to hear more.

Colorful language, the clever use of metaphor, and convincing performance combine to paint a memorable mental picture for your audience.

2. Fast Pace Editing

Directors tend to get all the acknowledgement when it comes to movies, television shows, and commercials, but the person who is intently responsible for delivering what you see and the story it tells is the editor.

Let’s take a seemingly simple talking head format on a white background with an actor delivering a company message. A simple enough scenario, but how many times should the scene be shot? Even if your actor nails the script on the first take, which is unlikely, you should shoot several more backup clips because once you get into the editing suite, all kinds of issues can crop-up.

But that alone isn’t good enough if you want to hold your audience’s attention. We shoot the same scene from three or four different positions or focal lengths so we can cut them together creating a visually interesting presentation. That means the editor has to go through a lot of raw footage to find the best takes.

Quite often you find the best visual take isn’t the same as the best audio take which means the audio from one clip has to be matched to the video of another putting a premium on the ability of the performer to deliver consistent pacing, and the skill of the editor and sound engineer to put it all together. So if you thought Web video was just a case of pointing a camera, you’d be wrong.

3. Multiple Characters

Clients are always worried about an audience’s attention span but the issue isn’t attention span as much as it is creating intrigue and interest. A video has to connect to an audience and peak their curiosity in order to hold their attention. If your video is boring, confusing, and bereft of any meaningful message or hook, you’ll lose them.

Sometimes you’ll notice commercials with an actor walking quickly through a scene talking all the while like he or she is in a hurry to find the closest washroom; it’s an attempt to inject some excitement or action into the scene but in fact it’s a poor substitute for a bad concept and a dull script. And worse still, it’s an expensive technique that generally requires a long dolly shot that can eat-up a lot of budget time and money.

We’ve already talked about using different clips from different angles to maintain pace and interest but another way is to use multiple actors, with each one setting up the pitch for the next, or each one finishing the last one’s sentence. This technique in the hands of a good editor can even make a static or mundane presentation work.

Yes, you read the title right. My company recently performed extensive search engine optimization on a client website, and the results were staggering. Within a month, organic search traffic had dropped by over 60%. Inbound leads from organic search had dropped by over 50%. And the client was absolutely thrilled with the results.

So when is less organic search traffic better? And when are fewer leads from organic traffic better?

Less traffic from organic search traffic can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of traffic, and fewer leads can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of leads.

To give you some background, this particular client offered a highly-specialized service to B2B companies. The reputation of the company and the quality of the service commanded a high dollar figure per engagement. They were THE major player in an industry that they had practically invented. However, their prior search engine optimization company did not factor in any of these very important considerations while optimizing the website.

The firm in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of search engine optimization, and they didn’t ever engaged the client with the type of questions that you would expect from a real business partner, including the most basic questions, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a marketing partner – they were a traffic delivery mechanism. They were not actively involved in the client’s success, because to them, increased organic search traffic was the sole measure of success.

They certainly were not lacking in technical skill – they were able to deliver quality rankings for competitive keyphrases. And the methodology was not suspect, as all techniques were well within the terms of service of all major search engines. So what exactly was the client justified in complaining about?

It turns out they had plenty of legitimate complaints. Although rankings and organic search traffic were up, sales were down. Additionally, web form leads were coming in and the phones were ringing, but nothing was closing. The sales staff was spending a lot of time following up on leads that were, quite frankly, junk. Outbound prospecting had come to a standstill because salespeople had marching orders to follow up on inbound leads, which were certainly abundant.

After a brief analysis, it quickly became clear what the root of the problem was. The prior search engine optimization company, with their “traffic trumps all” mentality, had turned the site into a magnet for do-it-yourselfers, small firms or individuals with very low budgets, and visitors looking for frée advice.

In their quest to obtain the most organic search traffic possible, the prior search engine optimization company had erred with the most fundamental building blocks of the campaign – keyphrase selection. Instead of carefully selecting keyphrases that were suitable to attract the high-end clientele that the client was accustomed to, they successfully (in the sense that they achieved high rankings) targeted keyphrases with modifiers such as “free,” “advice,” and “ideas.” All of these keyphrases were immensely popular, all of these keyphrases were difficult to achieve high rankings for, and all of these keyphrases should not have been utilized in the campaign in the first place.

When you optimize for low-quality phrases (“low-quality” obviously means different things, depending on a company’s goals) you receive low-quality organic search traffic in return. When low-quality traffic submits a form lead from a website, it stands to reason that the lead itself will also likely be low-quality. This was, of course, exactly what was happening to our client.

After our analysis, we broke the news to the client that the campaign had been fundamentally flawed. They were not happy to hear this news, but it did match up with their experience. We also told them quite frankly that moving forward, we would be emphasizing traffic quality over quantity, and by extension, lead quality over quantity. They were quickly convinced that organic search traffic was not the most important metric in a search engine optimization campaign, and were excited about a new, ROI-based approach.

Luckily, we did not have to throw out all of the work from the previous firm. They had laid a solid foundation in terms of tactics, which allowed us to recalibrate the keyphrases and realize results in a very short amount of time.

So, to revisit our accomplishments, organic search traffic decreased by 60%, leads were cut in half, and sales increased dramatically. The slowing pace of the incoming leads was more than offset by the quality of the leads – many leads derived from the Fortune 500 companies with whom this client was accustomed to working. Previously, visitors from these desired companies had been turned off by keyphrase modifiers such as “free” – they were serious people looking for a serious solution and they recognized that what they needed was not going to be free.

For too many people, including practitioners, search engine optimization has a very strict meaning – acquire rankings and traffic from related keyphrases. Until more companies realize that search engine optimization is a marketing tool to be judged and evaluated just like any other, there will be countless examples of campaigns deemed a huge success by those who worked on them, but as failures by those who have to deal with the aftermath.

Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it and we have to be consistent and persistent.

Sales conversion rates normally average less than 5%. What this means is that only 5% of the people who visit your site will become a paid customer. So, to grow your sales, you need to boost your traffic and/or your conversion rates. Below are twelve things you can do right now to start increasing your traffic to get those sales.

1. Launch an Article Marketing Campaign - Writing articles is not as hard as you might think and it can do wonders for your traffic! Write about something you know and just pretend you are telling a friend all about it. There is no need to use big, fancy words because people just want basic, straightforward information. Submit your articles to some of the more prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles.

2. Guest Posting and/or Commenting on Blogs – Do a search to find quality blogs in your niche and ask if they accept guest posts. Write helpful comments on existing posts and leave your link. Get involved and start building your reputation! A good place to find blogs that need guest posts is BloggerLinkUp.

3. Write Website Reviews – Review websites on Alexa and get more traffic and improve your Alexa rating. Go to Alexa, register an account and start reviewing and getting that traffic.

4. Relevant Keywords - There are a lot of free keyword suggestion tools you can use to find the top keyword searches for your niche. For example: if you own a pet care site, you would enter the words pet care and the tool would find the most relevant keywords for you to use on your site.

5. Yahoo Answers – Visit Yahoo Answers regularly and post as many answers as you can but be sure to follow their policies. You cannot try to directly lead people to your purchasing pages or leave low quality answers with your website link.

6. Interactive Site – Make your site interactive with forums, polls, surveys, etc. If your visitors feel more involved with your site, you will get repeat visits and longer stays. Add a little fun as well with contests, games, etc. Have a weekly or monthly scavenger hunt, trivia game, etc. Running a contest for a month can boost your traffic by thousands.

7. Business Cards – Produce an effective business card and hand them out wherever you go. Be sure to make it unique. Offer a discount on a first order. Add a personal message. Offer a freebie. Make your business card more than just your name and address.

8. Podcasting – A podcast is an audio or video broadcast which people can listen to and/or watch on many devices. Make your podcast informative but interesting. Talk about how your site can help the people listening and let them know about any contests or other interactive activities you offer. All you need to make a podcast is a working microphone and a voice editor such as Audacity. Once you have made your podcast, promote it in podcast forums and podcast directories such as PodcastBlaster.

9. Moving Billboard – Turn your vehicle into a moving billboard to advertise your website wherever you go. Use affordable vinyl coverings such as Car Wraps or magnetic signs from Esigns. A day of fun can bring you a lot of traffic from your mobile billboard!

10. Social Media – These days social media is a must for more traffic. Join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Visit message boards and forums and really get involved. Answer people’s questions, offer helpful advice and information. Becoming an active participant in social media can do wonders for your traffic.

11. Offer a Freebie – Write an informative report or ebook and offer it for free. Put in your website link and other business info. Let people know they can give it away on their sites as well. Add it to your email signature. Post it on your social media pages. Before you know it, your report could be all over the web bringing you new traffic every day.

12. Sitemap – Create an XML sitemap for your site and submit it to Google. A sitemap will allow more accessibility to your pages by the search engines, thus making your pages easier to find by people doing searches. You can easily create up to a 500 page sitemap with XML-Sitemaps. There are other options as well such as XSitemap. Do a search and find alternative options to choose from.

There are numerous ways to get more traffic to your site. Some will work for you and some will not. Try the ideas in this article and add to them, or mold them to work even better for you. Traffic does not come easily but by working hard, trying new ideas and finding out what works best for you will be very effective in boosting your traffic.

When I teach my SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn’t. I’ve always felt that it was important because they’re often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn’t they, with all the myths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn’t, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is:

Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it’s an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it’s the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of SEO has always been based on that principle, more people are coming around to it in the wake of Google’s Panda Algorithm.

Pre-Panda, many people built thriving businesses using the following basic SEO process:

* Buy a keyword-rich domain name that encompasses the products you want to sell.
* Build a templated website around it.
* Link internally to the product pages with descriptive anchor text.
* Use those same keyword phrases in the Title and H tags.
* Submit the website URL to lots of directories.
* Drop links to the website in other people’s blogs and forums.

Voila! Instant Google Success!

They’d repeat the process hundreds of times with different types of products, and then run on autopilot. While it might not have worked on every site they created, the sheer volume of websites they ran would be enough to make them a decent living.

So maybe there was a secret formula after all?

Perhaps, but after Google’s Panda Algorithm was implemented, many (but not all) who followed and succeeded with that formula for years suddenly lost a good chunk of their revenue.

What Changed?

My own speculation, based on numerous websites that I’ve reviewed where this happened, is that Google finally decided that there needed to be more to a website than having “SEO in all the right places.” And it makes sense. Why should one site do better than another just because they read up on SEO and knew the best places to stick their keywords? It shouldn’t. And by allowing exactly that to happen, Google was enabling sites with old-fashioned, by-the-book SEO to beat out potentially higher quality websites.

The result was Google not always giving their own users (the searchers) the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally blaming Google here. It has to be a daunting task for a machine to know the difference between an okay (but great with SEO) site and a great (but perhaps not so great with SEO) one. Especially when so much of how Google tried to determine relevancy and quality was based on links – and even more on anchor text. It simply became too easy to game that system.

Giving Google What They Wanted

I certainly understand and even empathize with those site owners who’ve lost a significant portion of their income. They were just giving Google what it wanted. And because it worked so well, they had no reason to go above and beyond their basic formula. Why build a brand for your company when a keyword-rich domain would provide a better return on investment? Why spend time becoming an expert in your industry and educating your target market on the intricacies of your products when you could hire someone to write low-quality “SEO articles” and submit them to article directory sites instead?

Interestingly enough, many of the business owners I’ve talked to who have been getting by with formula SEO all these years have told me that they have tons of happy customers. Yet there are no obvious signs of this online, such as glowing reviews on Google Places or other online review sites (there aren’t bad ones either). How are customers even supposed to remember the name of a company called something like WoodAndMetalDiningRoomChairs.com? (I just made that one up.)

Mainly, customers found these websites through Google, made their purchase and received their merchandise. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there was also no personal connection made. This is further illustrated by the fact that if you look at social media sites, you won’t see much chatter about these companies. In fact, many of them don’t even use social media, or simply have cursory accounts. Again, they didn’t need to.

No Marketing Budget

A marketing person, plan, or budget was never necessary nor even a consideration. Sadly, for those companies, they don’t have much choice anymore if they want to stay in business. But ironically, now that they really need a marketing budget, there’s no money in the till to go toward it.

If I’ve just described your business and websites – even if you haven’t lost a portion of your revenue (yet), you may have thought you could hire a new SEO company to mix in a little extra SEO mojo and fix up your Google problems. But while they might find some on-page or off-page things you could be doing better, I wouldn’t count on that to bring back your lost traffic and sales.

So What Should You Do?

You need to seriously rethink your online strategy. You need to stop saying, “Well, it always worked for me in the past.” You need to build a brand and you need to market the heck out of it. You may even need to consolidate all your related keyword-rich domain websites into one big brand website. (Don’t do that last one without consulting a professional.) You need to learn everything you can about social media marketing and start doing it. You need to get in contact with your happy customers and ask them to write reviews online as well as to evangelize about you to everyone they come in contact with. You need to also keep in contact with them in a variety of ways.

All of those things are going to make a much bigger difference over the long haul than rewriting your title tags or adjusting your keyword density. The big takeaway here is that while your website may already be the best it can be technically for search engines, it’s time to make it the best it can be for your users. Both parts of that equation are equally important. It’s not going to be quick or easy, but if you want to stay in business, it’s probably going to be necessary.
About The Author
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston

Google made a couple relatively quiet announcements this week that have pretty big ramifications for webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites.

If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about “important pages: “as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

“Obviously these three issues–malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs–aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

“One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

“For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

You’ve heard it before, here and probably elsewhere: Social media is about much more than exposure or coverage. Simply putting a fríend request out and amassing a ton of retweets is not enough to achieve genuine social impact.
In short, Google officials have said that while the search engine giant does use Facebook and Twitter as part of the input in determining a site’s SEO ranking, it is a very small, low-key part. It’s more of a modifier of other data than it is an actual contributor in and of itself.

But before you go slashing the budget to your social media marketing department, hear out these few issues that explain why this means more attention, not less, should be paid to social media efforts.

It’s Social, not Digital

Despite being in the online realm (insert all the stereotypes about the cold, impersonal Internet here), social media is all about the first word. Social interactions are about relationships, conversations and, above all, respect and trust. Violate a trust or fail to provide respect, and you gain nothing at all. You could even find yourself blackballed as your reputation flies out of control online.

There is no magic formula to social media success, just as there is no magic formula to being socially acceptable and friendly. It involves politeness, attentiveness to the interests and needs of others (not just yours) and participation in the social scene as a whole. That’s it – hard work, performed with an attitude of courtesy. It isn’t complicated, just slow and requiring attention.

But Why Bother?

After all, it doesn’t correspond to SEO, so why sink more effort into social media?

Because social media is the key motivating factor in whether a video, advertisement, or even random picture goes viral. The average user on Facebook has dozens of friends, and not all of those friends are the same. Say you have three people who are friends, each having 10 other friends. Only six of these friends are mutual friends among the three, which means there are 24 more people to reach. If each of them has the same ratio of friends… you get the picture.

So yes, adapting to social media does mean changing your perceptions of how marketing works. People can ignore it… they can block you online like they can’t block most commercials on television. You have to engage with them directly, converse in intelligent fashion and have the respect not to bombard them with your product nonstop. You have to know when to provide helpful input about your material, and when simply to listen. But the value of it, the potential return of genuine word-of-mouth rather than abstracted “website performance” metrics, is something worth fighting for and investing the additional time and money in.

Why Does It Work?

People like to be talked to. We are social animals, by and large, and having the ability to discuss topics with others is of vital importance to us instinctively, even if not consciously.

Additionally, people can see through fakes. Everybody has a customer service story where they’re told, “We appreciate your input,” and realize they’re just being read a line while their input is filed in the circular file. People respond far better to an honest comment, like, “We understand what you are saying, but for the following reasons we’re going to do what we feel works,” rather than being given the runaround. A genuine response reminds them there is another human being with their own restrictions and worries on the other side of the screen, and honesty gets a branding campaign point. Responsiveness and actual replies to commentary rather than rote recitations is also important, showing them you are listening and engaged, not just copypasting.

Indirect SEO

Believe it or not, engaging in good practices on social media sites while representing your brand will result in improved SEO for the brand whether Google directly ranks your Facebook performance in searches or not.

Word-of-mouth is still the strongest motivating factor in advertising. It’s the coveted Holy Grail. As you engage with others in social media, you are harnessing this power for your purposes. People who think highly of you will be more inclined to check out your website, and tell others to do so as well. Someone to whom you provide an answer to a particular issue that your brand covers might respond favorably to a request to link to you on his site. Traffic will build in the background, enhancing your standing. A conversation might lead to an interview with an online publication, or an advertising spot with a site whose owner you’ve had chats with.

They key is to understand the value of delayed benefits that result from being a nice, reasonable person. Gain a reputation as someone who is worthwhile to talk to, and people will want to talk to AND about you. The effort is extensive and the value is delayed; however, it will result in long-term support to your reputation that will allow your short-term advertising campaigns to go further, with more weight and endurance than if they were performed alone.

Google, the internet giant based in California, has had a strangle hold on much of the online market for the past decade. Most would struggle to find a single person in the Western World who is not yet familiar with the Google Search Engine. In fact the search engine is so popular that the phrase ‘Google it’ has been adopted by many Gen-Yers.

In addition to their massive presence in the search marketplace, Google also commands a large percentage of the online advertising industry, generating revenues in the region of US$35 billion per annum.

Facebook, a relatively new comer to the internet, and center of popular film The Social Network, is quickly closing on Google’s market. Currently Facebook ranks as the 2nd most visited website online globally and holds over 750 million member accounts. Facebook is beginning to threaten Google’s market dominance in online advertising due to the huge volume of data that the social network holds about its members. While Google’s advertising model focuses around what people are looking for, specifically using search queries, Facebook’s model allows advertisers to utilize behavioural targeting. A Facebook advertiser can select very precise advertising audiences by focusing on:

- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Employment Type
- Education Level
- Likes and Dislikes

By selecting a narrow cross section of the global audience by one or all of the above variables, an advertiser can see significant improvement in their ROI when compared with search or conventional marketing.

This is where Google Plus enters the scene. In May Google released a limited Beta of their new social network, to approximately 10 Million users. Google Plus, similar to Facebook, allows users to create profiles, enter personal details, connect with friends and join a global community online. The Google +1 button is the equivalent of Facebook’s Like button – allowing users to show their approval of an idea, concept, website or product and broadcast this to their network.

It’s not a new concept that Google uses a number of user specific factors to influence their search results. These have historically included the user’s location, past search history, bounce rate from certain sites, browser setting and a host of other signals to indicate whether or not a search result is likely to fit the user’s specific requirements or reason for search.

While not officially announced as yet, the Google +1 button will affect the manner in which search results are returned to users. The very nature of a social network suggests that people who are connected will share similar likes, beliefs and ideas, and consequently are likely to be interested in the same websites, resources and search results.

It follows then, that the connections of a user who have historically +1ed any given search result will have these sites promoted up the list of future search results due to perceived validity and relevance of that result.

So, when will this new ranking factor, or as Google now refers to them signal, start influencing search results?

That’s a tough question, and it’s likely only to be once the Google Plus and +1 button programs reach a critical mass. That is where the number of +1s reaches a volume and velocity that indicates considerable adoption by the searching public.

You can already see the impact of +1 within your search results, i.e. complete a search; navigate to page 3 of the results and +1 a single result Google returned. Now complete the same search again, it’s likely that the result you +1ed will be elevated within the new set of results. This is exactly the same behaviour we expect to see once Google brings +1 and Plus into full swing.

We expect that this will become a ranking factor around the end of the year, likely in time for Christmas shopping season.

What can you do to gain the maximum benefit from +1?

At present the +1 signal is only being used to influence a user’s personal search results, but this is likely to change late this year so it’s time to get started on a strategy to make the most of this opportuníty. This way when Google flicks the switch you will receive all the benefits of being +1ed and you will surge ahead of your competitors within specific market segments.

By now your web developer or SEO firm should have already contacted you offering +1 integration; it’s a good idea to get Facebook Like done at the same time. If not, get in touch with the team that manages your website and request them to place the +1 button prominently on your site. The button is pretty funky and modern and is not likely to do any damage to your branding or design. Make sure you are communicating with your clients, visitors and connections to ensure they +1 your site. The earlier you start work the sooner you will see results.