Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO is a huge part of getting your online material viewed by users and found by  search engines. If you aren’t aware by now of exactly what SEO is lets just say it’s like putting you on the map, it’s like giving a friend directions to your house. Except in this case the search engines are your friends and your house is your blog or website.

In brief, SEO is an optimization technique, which helps search engines such as Google, locate and rank your site higher than the millions of other websites on the results page when you attempt a search query.

Search engines send out what are called spiders or crawlers to search the web to see what is out there, they follow from link to link, site to site indexing everything they come across. Now of course there are millions if not billions of different sites, so it is not likely that these crawlers will visit your site on a daily basis, they might even go months without coming back to your page. If you have made changes to your blog or website by adding new content chances are the search engines might not know this right away, so you need to tell them and that’s what SEO is.

Why SEO Is So Important For Blogs

SEO for blogs can mean the difference of having 1,000 viewers or just having 10, and trust me if you are blogging for the purpose of making any kind of revenue then you definitely want more then 10 readers.

Performing SEO on your blog is like advertising to the search engines. It enables them to find you and rank you higher up in the search rankings, so that others will know you are there. You might be thinking to yourself “I put my web URL on all my business cards as well as in the ads I run in the paper and Yellow Book”. That’s good, for existing customers or readers and those people that already know you exist, but your not going to have new viewers Stumbleupon you while surfing the internet if the search engines don’t rank your blog.

Tips For Optimizing Your Blog

The first thing you want to do is to choose a good theme for your blog. A few aspects that you might want to consider when choosing your blog theme are:

• Does it use header tads correctly?

Header tags are very important when optimizing you blog. So make sure that the theme you choose uses H1 tags for the post title, H2 tags for the homepage post and H3 tags for popular post.

• Does it have breadcrumb navigation?

This will not only help the spiders out but it also makes it easy for your readers to navigate from post to post.

• Does It Look Good?

You want your blog theme to be appealing to the eye but you also want to make sure that it will load reasonably quick.

Optimizing your permalink structure is also very important for SEO.  Make sure to use your chosen keywords in the permanent URL as well as in the categories and the title of each post. Try to fit your most relevant keyword in somewhere and that should help you rank better for that keyword.

Write search engine optimized content. This doesn’t mean to just stuff thousands of keywords into your content and forget about the people who are reading about your blog, but find a good medium to where your content is interesting and fluent to the readers but also mentions keywords naturally with in your writing. Inserting pictures along with bullet points and H1, H2 headers will help break up the text and make it more user and SEO friendly. If you would like more tips on writing SEO friendly content “Writing Content That’s Reader and SEO Friendly” is a good article.

Try to avoid duplicate content if possible. The ranking power of your page might be decreased if you have multiple incoming links pointing to the same page. For example incoming links to www.checkoutmypage.com and www.checkoutmypage.com/index.php might be pointing to the same page, if so neither will rank as highly on Google as just one would. Also Google has a limit on how many pages of a site can be indexed, so having multiple pages indexed could cut down on the number of unique pages indexed on your site.

Make sure that every post on your page has its own title and description. Do not let a tool do this for you, make sure that you do this on your own so you can make sure you are describing what is in the content as well as placing keywords in your titles.

Using Social Media

Social Media is a good way to market your products, your brand, and yourself. By using social media sites not only will you be able promote your latest blog post through multiple outlets but you can also develop friendly relationships with your readers and more importantly other bloggers and professionals who are in the same field as you. You never know when you might want to have a guest blogger do a post for your site, and social media sure is a good way to develop these relationships.

Social media is the ultimate advertising platform. It’s inexpensive, allows you to be creative in the ways you promote or run contests, and is great for picking up ideas for new content. Social media will improve your accessibility not only to the consumer population but also to potential business alliances as I mentioned before with guest bloggers. Using book-marking site such as Digg, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, and Reddit can help promote your blog post and also help do develop links.

Help your readers and subscribers out by placing share this icons of all the social media and bookmarking sites on to each post. This will make it easy for them to pace on content of yours that they might find interesting, and also help you to develop more inbound links.

As you can se SEO is just as important for blogs as it is for any other site. If you want to rank higher in the SERP (search engine result page) make sure that you are optimizing every aspect of your blog from the content, to the pictures, to the video. Your mission is not complete with just optimizing your blog and writing posts, once you do those to thing get out there and promote via social media and bookmarking sites. If you do all of these things correctly you will be rewarded by the search engines with a higher ranking.

SEO is all about link building and page authority. So wouldn’t it make since to say that SEO and social media go hand in hand? After all two major factors in page ranking are authorative links and content, which social media provides. People

share links to things they find interesting on almost every form of social media outlets. This in return helps those websites to establish a higher position in the search engine rankings.  Plus there is no better way to get new fresh content for your website then by posting or linking to blogs as well as allowing users to submit comments and reviews.

It’s safe to say that SEO with out Social Media is like macaroni with out cheese; it’s just not the same. It can be done, however, you’re missing out on plenty of key factors that make it complete.

What’s-an-SEO-Strategy-Without-Social-Media

I look forward to hearing your opinions on the matter, Is Digital Asset Optimization something new or just a new twist on the same old SEO?

“Most Forms Of Advertising Are Predicting To Decline. Not Mobile.” By Apptera.com mentions how all forms of advertising is down while mobile is predicted to take a 30% jump here in 2010. The article attributes this not only to the effectiveness of text message advertising and banner ads but the immersion of voice advertisements. Voice advertisement is going to be the next big trend in mobile advertising. With Voice advertising there are plenty of options, from an ad you click on that talks, to a celebrity voice that will call your phone directly. My first experience with voice advertising was for Madden Football. A couple years ago I received a phone call from Chad “OchoCinco” Johnson talking smack to me about how he was going to kick my butt in Madden, so go pick it up. At the time I didn’t realize that a friend of mine had signed me up to get that phone call but I thought it was the coolest thing ever and a great way to advertise. This is just one of the reasons that mobile advertising will continue to grow. Furthermore, 84% of Americans have their phone on them all day so if you want an advertisement to reach these people, your best bet is to advertise via mobile instead of by traditional ways.  One of the reasons mobile advertising continues to grow is because of the fact that it is actually multi media advertising. Sure you might view or come across the ad on your cell phone, but the fact is that ad links to the companies product page, which links to their social media sites that they hope you will join, which links to product videos and so on. Mobile marketing is just one avenue in a whole campaign of multi media advertising, but the fact you have your phone on you all day is just where the campaign begins.

Another interesting article I read was “Mobile commerce evolving from early innovation to mainstream adoption: Javelin” by Dan Butcher. Butcher talks more about how mobile devices are being used for commerce and the development of mobile money. Mobile phones make everything in our life a little easier, and now with so much purchasing going on through mobile devices and online, mobile banking is becoming a huge thing. In order for mobile commerce to really take off though all the players are going to have to work together, From the merchants, payment terminal providers, acquirers, payment networks, mobile wallet and handset providers.

A few reasons mobile is becoming so big are that it makes our life easier. Whether it be locating places while your on the go to being able to bargain shop or compare prices without having to actually go to each individual shop, mobile devices save us time and make life easier. As a marketer the fact that we always have the phone on us makes it a viable outlet for us to advertise on. Mobile advertising is a direct passage way to the customer, we know their where about, we know their spending habits and we also know that if we send a text message to a mobile device 90% of the time it will get read. The question to be asked though, is when does some of this become invasion of privacy? As a marketer knowing as much as possible about a person is a good thing. As a consumer do we really want people to know every last detail about our lives?

A few of the big issues I see in the future are privacy issues, eventually people are going to get tired of getting an advertisement every day they walk past that Starbucks on their way to work and not want companies to know where they are all the time. Also with all our personal information being out there and the growing trend of mobile commerce with mobile banking, identity theft and scams will definitely be on the rise. If it is easy enough for a company to get all your personal information with the swipe of the phone what is to stop hackers and scammers from stealing this information?

The campaign that MooseJaw put together with Messagebuzz was in my eyes, flawless. According to this case study put together by messagebuzz.com, Moosejaw was able to increase their sales, in store foot traffic, and the amount of customer reviews they received.

Ace Hardware also put together a decent mobile campaign. Over the course of a month long campaign Ace ran behavioral targeted mobile banners on MSN Hotmail as well as MSN Messenger, which targeted media to home improvement enthusiasts and tool and hardware shoppers. They targeted male’s ages 25-54 using mobile media on MSN Weather, Verizon News, Verizon Weather and other Windows Live mail. All the media they put out their drove people to the Ace Hardware mobile website. The result was a 60% lift in brand awareness among males 35-54 years of age and 101% lift among those 25-54. In addition, Ace was able to increase there in store traffic by 8%. Ace ran an “every thing in your bag 20% off” promotion, which helped to increase in store sales. All of this was good but if they would have followed some of the tactics that MooseJaw was able to put into effect they might have had even more success.

Ace Hardware could have used their mobile advertising campaign to run more promotions and contests. This would of helped motivate more people to start getting involved. MooseJaw used the game rock, paper, and scissors to do this. They would send a customer a message to text them back with rock, paper, or scissors and if they were to beat MooseJaw they would receive coupons and prizes. This text game received a 66% response rate for MooseJaw and could have helped Ace Hardware out. Another suggestion that Ace could have implemented into there campaign is text message product reviews. Customer product reviews are huge for persuading people to buy something. So allowing customers to text in product reviews in their own words would help to generate larger amounts of reviews.

Another great thing that MooseJaw did was implement a point reward system for items bought on their mobile site. Then, they allowed customers to buy in store products using their mobile PayPal so that they would receive the reward points. Offering reward points is a great incentive to get people to purchase products; they know that by doing so they will receive future discounts. The fact that MooseJaw allowed their customers to use there mobile PayPal accounts to buy products in the store was genius because it allowed them to get the item they want right away with out having to wait for it to be shipped to them, but it also allowed them to get their reward points.

Implementing a few more techniques into Aces mobile marketing campaign, to help make it more fun for consumers all while promoting their product could of helped them to build a better relationship with their consumers and turned a good campaign into a great one. The mobile campaign that MooseJaw put together was flawless and will probably be studied and imitated by marketers for years to come.

The popularity of smart phones is exploding not only in the US but also all over the globe, which leaves mobile marketers with the challenge of putting together multi cultural advertising campaigns that will either appeal to everyone or be versatile enough to focus on the needs of an individual phone.

To target multiple cultures an advertisers ad has to have the capability to be viewed in many different languages. This will help to assure that it will not be passed on or overlooked because a certain group of people could not understand it. Another key factor in mobile as well as target advertising is the timing and relevancy of the ad. All countries do not celebrate the same holidays, and if they do they are not all on the same date as each other, for instance in China/Taiwan they celebrate Valentines Day on in July, so sending them ads for Valentines Day balloons in February is not going to have the type of results a company is looking for.

There are about 40 million US Hispanics many of which are mobile users. In the article “Yahoo! Launches Most Advanced Mobile Homepage for U.S. Hispanic Market” by Cory Pforzheimer, it is stated that Hispanics are outpacing all other groups in mobile Internet usage with 88% consuming content on their mobile phones. So this is a huge market that mobile marketers don’t want to miss out on.

A good way to make sure that as a company you are appealing to this demographic would be to make sure that your ads are being displayed with Yahoo! mobile users. Yahoo just launched Yahoo! Mobile en Español (visit http://espanol.yahoo.com from a mobile device) so making sure that your ads are being displayed through Yahoo! would be a great start to targeting the Hispanic community, and not to mention that Yahoo! is the number one web brand on the mobile Internet in the US reaching more than 35 million unique users per month.

There is a huge misconception by advertisers that only the youth use the cell phone. The article “ Mobile Advertising is For Adults, Too” by Jason Hoffman indicates that nearly half the population uses a cell phone as their primary telephone. So targeting adults over the age of 25 is also a huge market for advertisers to focus on. To make sure adults are reading your ads I wouldn’t recommend advertising on games as they are less likely to be playing them.  Instead a good way to make sure that your company is targeting the older generations are to do mobile advertising on News feed site as adults are more likely to be following current events and the stock market than they are to be playing the latest video game application.  Applications that make an adults life easier, are ones that are a good idea to advertise on. So anything that tends to make sense or has a function in a person’s daily life if more likely to get used and hopefully this will help in leading your company to more sales.