An interesting thing that is occurring for Google real time search is the fact that images have seemed to make it into the mix. Real time search is something that has taken our industry by storm and is going to grow to be even more important in the future. Ever since the community has been able to update the public to what it is that they are doing at any given moment search engines have scrambled around to find a way to be able to index this type of information in order to provide it to the public.

Real time search is one of those efforts that is still very young due to real time updates being an extremely young effort online that many search engines and websites are still really trying to figure out exactly how to harness it. Try searching in Google for something like “shoes” and in the left hand column pick “updates”. You will quickly see that images have now found their way into the spotlight for real time search. Well optimized images have always been an important part of search marketing but now it is evident that it is a factor that is only strengthening in power. To some businesses this might not really mean anything but to those businesses that really empower everything there is to offer in the online space this will be important to apply to their Twitter campaigns. Images are also important in the sense that they tend to keep the attention of an audience a bit longer. Studies have shown that images are a very important part of online marketing and should almost always be used whenever possible.

Things like images in tweets, Facebook updates and status updates in general are very important for updating rankings in real time search along with user experience. Remember that user experience is just as important and a good positive user experience can often times lead to great branding and possibly new business development.

Everything online is shifting towards taking a quality approach in the online space. No matter what you do or publish online think about how the search tools work and how they pull in data and you will start applying new tactics to all your search marketing efforts.

Growing a social community online might sound easy but it does take some time to have a community that will consistently help spread your message and interact with you. You have to have a certain likability surrounding you and strong branding is really a must. Communities are more likely to build and grow if you have a strong brand surrounding your company or yourself.

Here are some ways to build your social community:

1. Contests:

Frequent contests are a great way to really build up your following on the social communities. People really enjoy taking part of a good contest if the prize is worth their while. Pick prizes that will directly appeal to your audience. A year’s worth of software to help them with their business? Or even free tickets to an event or tradeshow surrounding their business. Make sure the contest works for your business model as well.

2. Blog:

Write in a blog every single day and pushing it through your social networks will definitely help you build your following. If you give your audience something to read on a daily basis they will eventually refer to you as an authority or a leading source in your space, as long as you put together well written posts.

3. Personality:

Give your community a personality. A personality is a way that people are attracted to participate with what you have to offer. Ask questions, joke with your community and get people to reciprocate in some sort of way. Give your community a reason to talk and chatter about you online. Don’t worry about how crazy it might sound online because crazy is sometimes good. As long as you are not offensive you will get people inquiring about you or your company.

4. Open Minded:

To build an online community you have to be open minded and willing to try a wide range of efforts to build up your community. Your social community should be approached like a business so it is important to try different marketing efforts to get people’s attention.

There are many ways to build a community online and these just happen to be some of my tips to build a following in the online space. Approach your social community like a big brand and over time you will generate a nice following.

RatePoint is in truth a one stop shop for businesses large and small to be able to grow their company through a variety of online marketing resources. RatePoint drastically improves your customer user experience by helping you increase your web marketing in areas like email, ratings & reviews, online surveys and social marketing. RatePoint can help any business listen to their customers and their audience a bit more in order to improve and streamline their business for the future while adding a significant grade of communication to the mix.

Let’s take a look at the different ways RatePoint can help your business:

Ratings and Reviews Feature from RatePoint:
RatePoint offers a variety of testimonial tools and services that can help a business take the voice of their customers and audience and really leverage them to grow their business. Customers really like to see other happy customers that have worked with your business prior. The RatePoint tool will actually allow you to collect testimonials and customer satisfaction data from all areas including the social networks and email.

Here is a video from a guy named Rob that works at RatePoint:

Email Marketing Features from RatePoint:
RatePoint also offers an industry leading email marketing service to help you keep up with your audience. Their technology offers maximum performance as far as email deliverables go with an outstanding 98-99% inbox rate. That means that a majority of all the emails that go out almost always avoid the spam filter leaving a very high success rate to get in front of your audience. If you are a business who does not interact through email newsletters and marketing on a regular basis with your past customers and email list you could be missing out on a great deal of new potential business.

Online Survey Features from RatePoint:
Online surveys are a great way to start an interaction with your audience that might have never performed any actions with you. RatePoint offers a survey product that allows you to learn as much as you can about your contacts and your audience. In order for a business grow into the future you need to collect raw data at some point on your audience. The only way you can make necessary tweaks and changes to your business is by studying your audience and listening to what they have to say about you, your industry and your company. RatePoint will help you learn everything you need to know by creating custom surveys for you in order to grow well into the future.

Social Media Marketing Features from RatePoint:
RatePoint will build and connect your social accounts right to their tools so you can immediately connect with your audience in the social networks through regular interaction. Send out your newsletters and any other correspondence right through Rate Point’s dashboard in just minutes and hit your entire social network with one swipe.

RatePoint offers small and large businesses a one stop shop to get a variety of online marketing done with ease. RatePoint will coach all businesses through each step to ensure that all communication is being conducted with maximum efficiency. RatePoint realizes that not every business knows how to break into the online space and start communicating with their audience. Let RatePoint take the guessing game out of web marketing for you.

I come across home pages of many websites that look like they are about to give a person a seizure. Blinking buttons, too many call to actions and a lack of focus can really hurt a business or a website in many different ways. A website home page should always funnel down quickly to the action needed.

1. Focus: Don’t feel like you have to shove everything you have onto the home page of your website. If you have a good brand and business people will make it around your website and find what else you have to offer. You don’t have to hit your audience with every single promotion your business offers right when they arrive at your website. Focus on the most important news or information they need to see and sprinkle the rest into your other pages.

2. Call To Actions: Call to actions are very important to have but you have to keep it minimal. Too many call to actions could really affect your business in a negative way. The last thing you want is your visitors feeling like they have too many things they need to do when they arrive at your website and they just end up leaving. If they leave for this reason chances are they will most likely not return back.

3. Synergy: Keep the synergy of your homepage the same from top to bottom. I often times see websites that have ads and content that just look very disjointed throughout the home page. Content should always be written in the same font and ads and images should always have the same consistency.

Your home page needs to be very clean at all times. Even if you are an ecommerce website you need to pay close attention to your home page. There is a thin line between just right and scaring people away. Often times when a web visitor gets scared away from a website they do not come back. Keep the home page focused and structured to exactly your business goals and your bounce rate will decrease over time.

I come across some crazy things sometimes in this industry and I wonder how and why sometimes people feel they deserve to be successful online after one month when other businesses have spent years putting in hard work to build up their brands in the online space. If you are getting involved in the internet marketing space you really need to be realistic with everything surrounding you online.

I hear people say things like I want 500 quality links in the next 2 weeks. Or I need 1000 unique visitors daily fast. Seriously? Come on you need to be realistic. First of all why is it that you deserve these numbers? Have you put in the leg work in your industry to get these types of numbers? Or did you read how search engine optimization helps you with inbound traffic and you assumed you can leap frog the important part of building a business, time.

Being realistic with yourself should be the very first thing you do when you venture into the online space with any business. The reality is that the industry is something different than what it once was and whether you remember how it was back in the day or if you just started, things take time. I think it is crazy when I hear these types of requests because it really takes time and effort to create a business online. If someone got you 500 links in 2 weeks I would worry about the health of your website because that would most likely be a black hat SEO approach which you don’t want.

Search engine marketing takes time and patience and most importantly a realistic approach. Take the time to learn what it really requires to increase traffic flow before you throw out crazy requests in the industry. One thing you don’t want to happen is to be disappointed when your requests are not satisfied and your feelings towards the SEO industry make you feel like it is a scam. You just have to take a step back and realize that it takes time to rank and build traffic in almost any niche out there.

What does SEO mean to you or your business?

To some it means simply putting together a series of inbound links that look like a science project and to others it looks like an online marketing business building plan aimed to actually brand and generate revenue, I think I would take the second approach. The right SEO strategy is not complicated but rather obvious to anyone that is wearing their entrepreneur pants.

Here are some tips for putting together your ongoing SEO strategy:

1. Never go after links from irrelevant sources. This meaning that if you sell car tires a link on a baby product website is absolutely NEVER going to help your link building in any way.

2. Always be consistent. One thing you do not want is to do a big push forward than stop, than do a big push forward and stop again. Keep it consistent and cut that big push forward and spread it out over 2 months rather than doing large “thrusts” of marketing efforts and stopping.

3. Don’t focus on websites that clearly have no link power. If the website just launched that link might not be that great for link building. Age will help link building in a much greater way.

4. Don’t focus on just one area to market yourself. Keep things diverse and your SEO strategy will go much further than just finding a certain location to hammer into the ground.

5. Don’t syndicate an article across a thousand directories thinking you are going to get anything out of that. That type of approach worked years ago and is no longer a real viable SEO marketing approach in today’s online market place.

6. Lack of deep linking. Build links to your important internal service pages and popular blog posts. This will spread your SEO out throughout your website and not just your homepage.

There are good approaches to marketing yourself online and there are bad approaches. It is important to realize that some of the older search engine optimization approaches that were used years ago are simply not the right way any longer. Building a business online now calls for a quality approach backed by a solid plan.

There really is no secret sauce when it comes to search engine optimization. There are however some important efforts that every new website owner or SEO beginner should be doing when it comes to getting their message out.

Meta Tags: Every meta tag on your website should always be unique. I come across websites all the time where all the meta tag information is exactly the same throughout the entire website which is a very horrible approach. Keeping all your meta information unique on every page of your website is important in order to pull in different amounts of traffic. A successful product page is not going to have the same meta information as your home page. Keeping your meta information different will allow your website to pull in different types of visitors over time. You should always identify all your targeted keywords for your web pages prior to starting the process of onsite optimization. It is important to execute this correctly because it will set the path for all your future website visitors.

First Keyword: Whatever your first word in that meta tag keyword section is should be the first word in your meta title tag. This allows the search engines to realize that the word has high importance for your SEO strategy and more weight will be put on that word. It gives your search engine optimization that much more of an ability to really rank for those designated keywords in search results.

H1 Tags: Don’t forget to use H1 tags on your pages. An H1 tag is a bolded header sitting above any piece of content that acts as a title. You always want to incorporate a keyword into this area as tastefully as possible and you don’t want to over stuff your keywords. Bolded paragraph headers often times have really nice SEO weight when it comes to search spiders reading and ranking material.

Interlink: Don’t forget to interlink your pages throughout your website. Interlinking is a very important component of SEO and you always want to hyperlink keywords that appear naturally in the copy of your website and link those keywords to other important pages of your website. Interlinking your website will allow your site to look like a giant spider web. Interlinking creates shortcuts to important pages of your website which search engines really like. Plus the user experience will increase allowing web readers to find other important pages much quicker than having to look for them.

Launch A Blog: Search engines tend to really like blogs. It is a nice healthy way to add new fresh content to your website and keep your web traffic engaged. Plus if your blog is on your website you can interlink important pages from your site right into your post helping with your internal linking structure. Over time your blog posts will really start to rank in search results bringing in new streams of targeted web traffic. If you ever decide to enter the social realm of marketing your business your individual blog posts will be a great way to leverage your social audience and let them know you have arrived.

Alt Tags: Don’t forget to optimize your website images for image search. Each image on a website has an opportunity for some keyword placement. The best approach is when you can describe exactly what is going on in the image while tastefully using your targeted industry keywords.

URL Structures: Don’t forget to properly optimize your URL structures when you are optimizing your website. If you have launched a new website than this shouldn’t be a problem. If you website is aged make sure your web pages are not ranking currently before you change the URL structures because you could see a dip in rankings.

In a nut shell these are very important efforts to focus on when either first starting a new website or optimizing an old one. This will allow your site to run like a well oiled machine when it comes to the search engine results.

Whether it is Google analytics or some other technology (such as Go Stats) you use, it is always important to track what is happening on your website. If you have pages that need help your analytics information will become very important. Good analytics monitoring will also allow you to really leverage your online marketing efforts.

Here are some things that I like to do when looking at my analytics information.

Keywords: Take a look at what keywords are pulling in visitors to your website. If you are a freshly new launched business it might take some time for this area to start filling in but eventually you are going to see keywords and phrases that are pulling in your visitors. Search for those keywords and take a look at what is ranking. If they are internal pages, your home page or even blog posts you can now revise those pages to make them even stronger. Take a look at what else is ranking around you for those search terms and see if there are any places you can leave a comment. Those comments plus your rankings will allow your brand to build nicely in those particular search results.

Pages: Go through your data and find out what pages of your website are ranking and which ones are not. The ones that are clearly ranking and generating visitors can now be tweaked for other types of conversions. All of a sudden you have a new portal that you didn’t expect to rank and now you might be able to tweak that page out to increase conversions. Add a lead form, a phone number or whatever your goal of that page is.

Posts: If your data tracks your blog posts you can now see which blog posts rank the best and you can start to push those specific blog posts a bit further through the social channels. If you have blog posts that are starting to really develop some steam and you have never really done much with them now is the time to take those posts and leverage them. Allow them to grow even more in power.

Analytics information can always be used to your advantage. Do not just look at the data and see how many visitors you get. Analyze where the visitors are coming from and what page they are using to get there.

Out of all the search engine optimization strategies and tools out there a business websites keywords are one of the most important components they will take when venturing into the area of online marketing and achieving search engine rankings. Keywords are the bread and butter to your search engine marketing campaign and if you get those wrong you could see the wrong audience making it to your website.

Keyword Discovery by Trellian is an important keyword research tool that will assist you to take the guessing game out of conducting your keyword research. Sitting there and trying to manually come up with your keywords by hand will not allow your website to perform to its full capacity and potential. Often times there are many more, sometimes even hundreds of more keywords than a website owner can come up with manually. Often times trying to come up with long tail keywords and phrases is like taking a stab in the dark. Don’t shoot your onsite optimization or external marketing in the foot right from the start because you will find yourself trying to figure out what is wrong with your outside marketing efforts.

Keyword Discovery is a very easy and simple to use keyword research tool that anybody or business can use with relatively little education on how to use the program. This tool is very user friendly and very easy to navigate through allowing virtually anyone to use it properly.

All a user has to do is simply type in the starting keyword they want to research and hit the search button. Keyword Discovery will then pull in as many variations of that particular keyword or phrase that are being used with search volume so you can determine the popularity of a certain keyword. This process will often times allow you to find new industry keywords they you didn’t even know existed. Often times it is keywords and phrases that are not the most obvious that are being used very frequently on a monthly basis. Without a tool like Keyword Discovery many website owners would be running at 50% capacity.

Keywords are not just important for onsite optimization and rankings. You can also use Keyword Discovery to fully maximize your pay per click campaigns so you are targeting all the right keywords for your industry. Aside from PPC keywords are important almost anywhere you have to make the most of your content when trying to spread a message. Utilizing keywords in titles of press releases and articles is also a very important step to gaining valuable visibility from any efforts that might be conducted on a monthly basis. Keyword Discovery truly allows a business to fully succeed locating the right targeted keywords that are relevant to their business. Your business can’t afford to play a guessing game when it comes to search engine marketing and keywords. Use Keyword Discovery and get competitive in your industry very quickly with your keyword research!