Integrating your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Social Marketing is easier than you might think because Social Marketing is an essential facet of SEO and one that is becoming increasingly relevant as social networking sites continue to become more popular. If Social Marketing is a term that sounds complicated and intimidating, it can be greatly simplified and more easily understood if you consider that it is merely the oldest form of marketing around that has been given a new name.

Simply put, Social Marketing is word-of-mouth-advertising accelerated and made much more accessible by technology through the use of blogs, forums, inbound and outbound links, and social networking sites such as MySpace, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, and others. All these methods create communities of people with common interests and give them the opportunity to ask questions, share ideas, offer criticism, and get feedback from their peers and your company.

Here are some ideas that you can employ to integrate SEO with Social Marketing strategies so your company gains the maximum benefit from these very dynamic marketing strategies:



Craft a Strategy – Set your SEO and Social Marketing integration up for success by crafting a marketing strategy and consulting with an experienced Internet marketing firm. Businesses such as Brick Marketing can explain the nuances of these approaches and provide invaluable insight on how they work together to help your company get results.

 

Create a Community – Consider setting up forums on your site where your target audience can ask questions and get answers from your company and other members of the forum. A large portion of your audience makes purchasing decisions after conducting online research, and this will give them one place to find the answers they seek.

 

Start a Business Blog – Start a blog on your site with relevant, well-written posts providing topical information about your goods and services as well as links to related blogs and websites. This gives your readers the information they’re looking for and provides great opportunities for quality inbound links as well.

 

Keep your Content Fresh! – Keep your online community growing and engaged with fresh, dynamic content that always gives your readers something new to read and discuss. Also remember that the major search engines will index the content of your site more often if you update it regularly.

 

Use Targeted Keywords and Phrases in your Titles and Content – Use the optimized keywords and phrases that you targeted in your initial strategy in the titles and content of your blog and forum posts. You don’t have to overdo it, just let them occur naturally.

 

Provide Links to Popular Social Networking Sites – Search popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, and others for fresh, relevant content to link to. Remember that these links don’t always have to be all about business. You can balance the serious links with lighter, funny content as well.

 

Subscribe to RSS Feeds – With your own research and recommendations from your Internet marketing consultant, find relevant RSS feeds to feature on your site which provide fresh content and give your viewers another reason to check your site often.



 

The most important part of integrating SEO with Social Marketing is getting started and developing a plan but once these strategies are in place, you’ll be amazed by the new volume of traffic to your site.

 

Creating an RSS Feed Manually

Let’s manually compose a basic RSS feed. Assume that we want to generate a feed about documentation standards and guidelines significant to the IT industry. Within this feed, we can embrace a number topics such as:

- Writing style

- Concern of correct grammar, punctuation, and spellings

- Sentence arrangement

- Guidelines for writing technical documents, white papers, installations sheets, customer service feature manuals, and user guides

- Sample templates

- Tips for conforming to international standards

- Superiority of avoiding or enclosing colloquialism

- Rules for reviewing and editing

- Charges for writing beginners, experienced, and experts

Each topic identified before forms an item for the RSS feed. Our first item can be written as follows

Item Title Writing Style

Item Construction

The purpose of a document and its audience define its writing style. A formal present such as a white paper or a management report must have the formal tone. In contrast, a user guide musts to be written in a more friendly tone. Learn more about writing style and construct result-oriented documents.

Gather similar news for all content to be included in the feed. This data forms item info part of the RSS feed.

Using the Basic RSS Feed Format

The next course after collecting the feed information is to put in a standard format, which the Internet browsers and RSS aggregators can sense and interpret to show it correctly on your PC. The format for this file is as follows:

Insert feed title

Insert feed URL

Insert feed Description

en-us

Insert date and time

Insert title of the first item

Insert URL of the detailed article for the first item

Insert Explanation of the first item

Insert author’s email address (Author’s name)

Insert item spreading date

Insert title of the second item

Insert URL of the detailed article for the second item

Insert Explanation of the second item

Insert author’s email address (Author’s name)

Insert item broadcasting date

:

:

Notice that there is only one example of the channel tag, whereas numerous frequencys of the item tag. The number of item tags should be the same as the number of elements you want to embed in your RSS feed.

The tags in red bring out the extra news you can embed in an RSS feed. This information is not obligatory, but gives the article more credibility and offers the readers an option of communicating with the author.

The purpose of a document and its audience define its writing style. A formal arising such as a white paper or a management report must have the formal tone. In alternative, a

Use the hereinbefore format to add newsletter for other items and your feed is settled!

Assign the feed a name and save it. Many and various RSS resources say that all RSS feeds have the extension .rss or .xml. In reality, however, an RSS feed can have any extension or no file extension. Respective RSS feed generating software written in hypertext preprocessor (PHP) use the .php extension for the feeds they create. It is also for the benefit of keeping things simple and filenames indicating their content that people might add .rss or .xml extensions to RSS feeds.

You can put together as several part as you want though try not to exceed beyond 10 index per feed for usability reasons.

In an RSS feed, index are typically arranged in the reverse chronological order with the existent item being the first one and the oldest item at the end, just like news headlines.

Even if you are new to Internet, you can no doubt create an RSS feed as long as you follow this basic feed format and you have importance content to publish.

Click the Validate button for code validation to begin and wait for some time to view message informing you about subsistence or absence of any errors in the file. If the validator reports any errors, fix them, and recheck the code until all errors are fixed.

Adding Digital Media

Adding digital media containing images, audio, and video can transport your audience to a unusual realm. With this capability, your messages become alike more personalized and blend that human touch to the process.

Without actually embracing an audio file, you can integrate a recognized link in your RSS feed directing the users towards a file which when selected allows the surfers to download it. The subscribers can refer to it repeatedly and when ever they want to.

Moreover, RSS 2.0 supports a new feature named inclusion to enable feed creators enclose digital media content. When an appropriate inclusion reading software comes across such a feed item, it reads the accompanying link and content form to automatically download it and store it on a media device.

Using Software to Construct an RSS Feed

Software offers many and various advantages over manual:

- No requirement of any technical knowledge including that of XML or HTML.

- Spell check to eliminate spelling mistakes from feeds.

- No have to validate your feed.

- Eases the process of updating a feed.

- The option of adding your operation logo thereby giving an identity to the feed.

The next part will be about: “Tips for Creating Powerful RSS Feeds”

If you can’t wait till the next part release, or you can’t discover the first 3 parts please download the extensive report from our web site in the downloads area.

One of the challenges of email marketing is getting the email actually delivered. There are several ways that email can end up as Spam, and steering clear of these causes will give your email marketing efforts a much greater likelihood of success.

How to Prevent Emails from Landing in Spam Folders

First, make sure that any small business marketing email is sent only to people that you already have an established relationship with, or those who have requested to be sent your communication. People you already have a relationship with can be considered personal friends or family, or people you have a business relationship with, such as customers, associates, and similar individuals. If you don’t know the recipient personally, it is best to have people “opt in” to receive your mailings. Having people subscribe to your mailing list is the best way to do this. Mailing outside of these parameters is likely to result in some recipients reporting your emails as Spam.

Second, mailing to a large number of names at once using personal email accounts often triggers a Spam designation. Even if you are mailing legitimately (i.e. people have requested your email), if you are mailing to more than 100 names at a time, it will likely be presumed to be Spam. Using a mailing service that is well known and respected by the internet service providers (ISPs) will help ensure that your mailing is viewed as legitimate when mailed en mass.

Even when you’ve mailed to an opt-in list, and are using a respected mailing service, your well intended email may still end up in a Spam folder instead of an inbox. This often happens due to using certain words or phrases in “subject lines” of emails that are often associated with Spam emails. The subject line is the header that is seen when an email shows up in your email in-box.

Email filters are used by ISPs to check the words in an email’s subject line. A good subject line can encourage people to actually pen an email. A bad one can mean your email gets deleted, or worse, it can cause your email to be categorized as Spam.

Often the more sophisticated service providers use a “point system” that identifies trigger phrases commonly used in Spam emails. Once an email accummulates a certain number of “points,” the email gets filtered out and is never delivered to a customer. In some cases it doesn’t even go into a Spam folder, but it gets completely blocked.

Common Phrases Considered “Spam”

Although it’s impossible to identify each word or phrase that can trigger a Spam designation, there are certain words that are almost always likely to cause problems. Examples from this list include the folllowing words:

amazing, big money, call now, cash bonus, credit, click here, collect, compare, discount, double your income, earn $, eliminate debt, 50% off, free, freebie, get rich, information you requested, loans, lose weight, lose inches, million dollars, make money, mlm, multi level marketing, opportunity, promise you, refinance, removes, reverses aging, satisfaction guaranteed, serious cash, stop (or stops), you’re a winner.

There are some additional problem phrases that can trigger some Spam filters, or start adding “Spam points.” The following phrases should be avoided as well:

Act now, all new, all natural, as seen on tv, avoid bankruptcy, buy direct, cash, casino, consolidate debt, credit card debt, don’t delete, easy terms, get paid, guaranteed, great offer, give away, limited time, meet singles, no cost, no fees, offer, one time, pharmacy, pharmaceutical, prescriptions, online marketing, order now, please read, save up to, special promotion, unsecured debt, unsecured credit, vacation, viagra, visit our web site, while supplies last, why pay more, winner, work at home, you’ve been selected.

Other Spam Triggers to Avoid

Besides phrases, using quotation marks, dollar signs and exclamation points in subject lines also can trigger Spam filters. So does using all capital letters, which is considered “shouting” in the online world.

You should also never put a toll-free number in the subject line as that can also cause your email to be filtered out by many filters.

Finally, when you start seeing new spam using certain words or subject lines in your own mailbox, simply know that these will start showing up in Spam folders soon. Make note of those words and phrases and know you should avoid them as well.

Deliverability Tip

To check your deliverability before you mail, you can purchase Spam check software that will help you verify that your email is free from identified Spam triggers. Another way to check your deliverability ahead of time is send your finished email to yourself and one or two friends that have good email Spam filters. If you do this before sending it out to your entire list, you will be able to see if your email scoots past the Spam filters and actually lands in the inbox. If it does, you can be reasonably sure that your email will get delivered. Now the challenge is to just get it opened!

© Karen Porter. This article may may be freely published provided all content is left intact and the author bio/resource information below is included in its entirety.