Social Media Mistakes For Chicago Businesses To Avoid Part 2

October 29, 2009

In our last post, we discussed some ways that companies frequently make mistakes while using social media for their business, resulting in a passive approach and eventually a failing social media campaign. The following tips will help you and your company avoid making the opposite types of mistakes, being too aggressive with social media:

Creating Pages On Too Many Sites: Since social media for business is a time consuming endeavor, it is impossible to reach everyone and be involved on every social media website, all while running a successful business. Devote some time to research your industry on different social media sites and identify which ones will benefit your company the most. You need to find the place that will allow you to interact the most with your potential customers, and that is going to be different for every company.

Abusing The Rules: Social media users are a group of intelligent people that don’t want to be manipulated. If your organization uses certain techniques, for example, posting multiple spam-like messages in Facebook or Twitter to try and attract more fans, people will get upset with your company and stop following you. The majority of companies that make this mistake are just starting their efforts in social media and want to try and get their message out to the highest number of people as fast as possible. However, the better approach is to sign up, read what other people are talking about and get a good feeling about the overall conversation on that social media site, and then slowly join in with valuable information.

Obvious Selling: Companies that go on social media and try the usual hard sell tactics in business will find that followers/fans don’t respond positively to it. The whole social media culture is based on people communicating with others in order to help everyone. It is not about businesses selling their products to consumers in the social media realm, so don’t treat your followers like they are just there to buy your product. Remember, you have to contribute to the conversation before you can expect anyone to buy what you’re offering.

Deliberate SEO: It is not a secret that social media has become an important part of search engine optimization. This shouldn’t mean that the only reason why you’re on social media sites is to get more links to your website. Your success on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else depends on how much you offer other people. They aren’t just search engine robots scanning your page and looking for keywords, so don’t expect them to stay your follower if all you’re looking for are keywords and backlinks.

Social Media Mistakes For Chicago Businesses To Avoid Part 1

October 27, 2009

Chicago social media is becoming more and more prominent within the small business community. Whether a company runs their own social media campaign or hires a Chicago social media expert to bring results, we should all be aware of certain mistakes that companies across the country have made on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The most common mistakes companies of all sizes have been making in the social media community since businesses started promoting themselves can be broken down into two categories. There are the mistakes that are made because a company is not being proactive enough, and there are the mistakes made because they are being too aggressive with their social media campaigns. Here are some mistakes that fall in the first category:

Incomplete Profiles: Nobody recommends businesses to join every social media outlet; it’s just too time consuming. So if you choose two to three of the most beneficial ones to your company, there should be no reason why your efforts on that site aren’t completely devoted to succeeding there. If you make the decision to create an account, take the time to enter all your information and make your identity unique to your company. Add pictures, descriptions etc. so you can show people who you are. This is where your social media brand begins, and it is very important to have a good start so visitors know you are involved in social media for the right reasons and will have a better chance to engage with you.

Not Communicating With Fans: If you have a following, however large it is, make sure you are part of the conversation. If you don’t engage with the people who are talking about you on social media sites, their expectations won’t be met. There are plenty of companies that are great at responding to fans or even replying with a thank you, which means if you don’t do that consistently you will loser followers.

Quitting Your Campaign Too Early: Many of the small businesses in Chicago try out social media but don’t give it enough time to see results, so they just give up. Try to begin with a good marketing plan before you setup all your accounts, and use different tactics to engage with your followers/fans.

Inconsistent Posting: Social media is an ongoing approach to marketing your organization, and you need to understand that people use it every day and expect new content from you on a regular basis. You don’t have to update your pages every day, but if you take weeks at a time to post something new, you will most likely lose followers.

Coming up: social media mistakes because of being too aggressive.

The Important Differences Between SEO and SEM

October 15, 2009

Just about everyone knows that search engines are a powerful tool to reach potential customers. You want your company to be on the top of the search engine results page for as many of your most important keywords that you have. There are, however, many different ways to go about this undertaking. Two of the most commonly expressed services in the web design/internet marketing industry are search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). These can be confusing to differentiate sometimes, as they are both related to very similar goals.

These two terms are commonly thrown around when dealing with ways to increase a website’s exposure, and often the different aspects of each will be viewed as SEO by one person but as SEM by another. For example, if a company says they will build links for you by submitting your site to multiple directories, they could consider that service part of their SEM package because it is an external effort, but they might also consider it SEO because it doesn’t necessarily involve paying for anything.

There are some general rules that almost all companies will accept. First, SEO is considered a part of your SEM efforts, because the search engine marketing will encompass a larger range of tasks. Second, any enhancements a company makes to their organic search results fall under SEO, because you are optimizing your website by creating meta tags and titles and so on. Finally, if a company is directly paying for their search engine results by using Google AdWords or other forms of paid advertising, this will be part of SEM, because you are paying for each time your link is clicked on.

As you can see, there are different benefits for using each. Search engine optimization will take longer to accomplish, but the results can be very beneficial and the traffic cost will always be zero. With online advertisements, a company will have to pay a large amount of money to keep their instant exposure, and the clicks or impressions their ad receives doesn’t always turn into sales for them. Don’t forget, if the marketing budget for online ads runs out, your company will lose the link exposure at the top of Google immediately, and your SEO will still be stuck in the same place.

View our complete list of Chicago SEO services

The Latest In Chicago Web Design: The Comedy Shrine

October 15, 2009

The Downtown Naperville comedy club partnered with Design & Promote to develop their new website and spread the fun online. The Comedy Shrine needed a place where people could get a feel for their comedy club on the Web, and find out more information about them. Their new site includes pages to learn more about their variety of shows, different comedy classes, ensemble, and even rent the club out.

A unique function that Design & Promote included on this website is the ability for visitors to follow the Comedy Shrine easily by using icons for sites like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Google Bookmarks, that link to those respective sites. The Chicago SEO company also included a section on the homepage for The Comedy Shrine’s most recent specials, which The Comedy Shrine can update whenever they need to.

CEO of Design & Promote, Bruce Jones, says, “This site was one of the most fun to design. The Comedy Shrine wanted some great features for their website, and they were a pleasure to work with.”

Other features that were included in this web design include a video of the week, online booking with the theater rental request form, and an attractive layout that is easy to navigate.

About The Comedy Shrine

The Comedy Shrine main stage show features top professional actors performing short form improv similar to those seen on ABCs “Whose Line is it Anyway?”. The audience interaction means each show is uniquely funny! Other shows include The Comedy Shrine “Better Than Cats!” musical with dinner and theater package. Visit their website to learn more about The Comedy Shrine and buy tickets online.

www.thecomedyshrine.com

Using Keywords To Create The Most Efficient Website Title

October 1, 2009

Your search engine optimization efforts include many different ways to get your website higher on sites like Google, but some are more important than others. Before worrying about how many backlinks you have or how many blog posts you’ve written, a good website should always have keyword rich title tags. Similar to our recent post about Why Buying A Domain Name That Includes Your Keyword Is Important, the title is also one of the most important factors in good SEO.

The title tag is like a headline, it appears at the top of the web browser when your homepage is open, and it also is what appears on the search engine results page when your site is listed. Because of these factors, it is important to remember that what you write in your title is not only for search engines to crawl and find keywords in it, but it is also likely that your title will be the first thing someone reads about your website. You don’t want to write something that is just keyword after keyword, because someone reading that won’t be very compelled to click on it.

One basic rule for incorporating keywords into the title tag is to use your most important keywords first, because the order in which the words are plays a role in how search engines scan it. It is more important to use different keywords in the title than to repeat any keywords, because the title will be more relevant to a wider variety of keyword searches if you use your 2-3 most significant keywords. You don’t want the title to be too long, so keep the number of characters including spaces to less than 75. For example, Design & Promote’s title, Chicago SEO Web Design And Search Engine Optimization Design & Promote, is 70 characters with spaces, and you can see when searching for “Naperville web design” on Google that the whole title appears, not just a portion of it followed by three dots:

Once you have the basic title down, here are a few more tips to make it even better. If you want to include your company name in the title, make sure it is at the end. Some companies rely on their geographic location, which is a good thing to include in the website’s title. Finally, make sure every page on your website has a unique title which distinguishes the content of that specific page. This will help search engines crawl your pages and also help visitors to your site navigate through it.

Below are two examples of title tags that different websites are using. As you can see, the first one needs some improvement. This title is for the a bakery in Chicago. As you can see, they only used “Home Page” and left out the most important keywords that they want people to search to find them online.

The second one follows the most important rules. It uses the most important keywords first, is the right length, and it makes sense when reading it.