Online business has relied on search engine optimization (SEO) since the arrival of the internet. This is a way of making sure that a website can be found by customers using search engines like google.  It has long been the best way to reach people that are looking for your business and are in a buying mood, so it cannot be over-stressed as an important starting point.

But for today’s customers, SEO alone is simply not enough. Social networks are the connections people have with each other, not just with products.  A good business has to develop a tight community, which is where a social network manager is essential.

Successful social networks have three major components:

• Contact, or how people find the network
• Content, or something that they like enough to stay a while, and
• Community, where they build relationships with other people like them.

Together, these are the “Three Cs” of a successful social media strategy.

SEO still matters because it is a powerful point of Contact for customers who are looking for products, ideas, and other people like them. The best SEO is never a substitute for good Content, however, so there has to be something more than just a list of keywords that catches a search engine like google.  That skill is still very important.

Building Community around the Content is where a successful social network manager comes into the picture. There are many tools available to build a Community, and many choices that can be made based on the people and products that are involved.  It may make sense to build the Community on twitter or facebook, for example, which are excellent tools, or it might make sense to use something else.  A business may choose to develop Community on its own blog, especially if Content is very important.  There may even be an existing Community that it is best to just tap into as a contributor or expert, rather than build a new one.

These choices are not difficult, but they do require some skill to navigate. That’s where a social network manager comes into the picture.  There are many social media sites that have their own quirks and advantages.  Knowing their way around facebook or how to time twitter “tweets” are some of the skills that take time to develop.

The most important part of any social media campaign for a business is having a strategy in place. The “Three Cs” work best when they work together with a consistent message and image.  Without a careful plan that takes into account the relative strength of websites like facebook and twitter, many people often let their tactics create the strategy, rather than the other way around.  That’s always a mistake!

Getting it to work well is more than just a matter of message, however.  The goal is to “close the loop” and have your online Community reach out to friends of theirs as a new point of Contact.   That’s when an online social network really begins to grow and blossom into a highly successful presence on the web.

A good social network manager has the knowledge and skills to understand the relationship between the “Three Cs” and create an online Community effectively. It’s not a substitute for SEO, but a powerful addition to it.  It’s how you turn one-time customers into loyal fans who rely on your business in their daily lives.  Hiring a social network manager who can do this is the best thing a small business can do on the web today.

Written By Erik Hare a Social Network Manager you can read more from Erik Hare at http://erikhare.wordpress.com/

Before you try to understand the posts in this section you will need to understand the concepts and terms used in the other posts in the other categories. So please take time to refresh yourself with the information provided in the General Concepts, SEM, SERP before advancing to the advanced tips on how to market your site on the internet.

In this section I will be using terms like SERP, SEM, Links Marketing, SEO and other shortcut words that you will learn in the other areas of this site.  It is important that if your going to advance to this section that you first fully understand these terms and how they are used. So that you will not wonder what it is that I am talking about when I mention something like “through links marketing you will not only increase your SERP, SEM, and SEO of your site and have a higher PR than your competition.” Unless you understand what the shortcut words I use mean, you will have no clue how to understand what it is that I am going to provide you here in this section.

So again I urge you not to start reading this section unless you already have read the rest of the information I have provided, or already understand what most of these sorts of terms mean go back and start with the begining.  We are getting into the technical sides of how to make your site rank at the top of the search engines for the terms and words that relate to your site and also how to use other sites to increase your sites presence on the internet.

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Google, manditory and easy to do.  If you go to google and look around you will find a link that allows you to submit a site to them.  Once that is done eventually google will get around to indexing your site… sooner or later if you search for your domain name you will find it.

Yahoo, manditory and easy to do.  There are two types of submissions you can make to Yahoo.  One is a regular free submission which like google once they get around to you they will index your site.  The other is a annual fee you can pay for inclusion into their directory.  Some swear by paying for inclusion in the directory part of Yahoo as key to getting high ranks with Yahoo.  As I look at it unless your making lots of money off of your website there are other ways to get into yahoo that are more effective than their directory submission.

MSN, manditory and again easy to do.  MSN like google offers a way to present a new website to them which eventually they will get around to indexing and offering up in searches.

You must wait until your site is up and operating before you register with a search engine. No pages that are under construction or empty of content.  You can have blank pages or incomplete pages, just do not link them to the live part of the site until they are ready to go.

There are other directory’s / search engines out there and if you run across one your not in, you should register yourself. In another article I will explain how you can get yourself into almost a thousand directories which will help to increase your Page Rank on the major search egines.

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Directory Submissions Information click

Without links there would be no web. Links are what make the web the web.  They are what take you from one site to another searching for what ever it is your finding.  Links are one of the most important parts of the internet and your site.

There are a number of types of links you can get. Some are good, some are not.  Good links are links that are coming into your site.  You only have limited control over who links to you.  There are no laws on the internet that forbid people from linking to you. While some incoming links are better than others and certainly better than none, the right kind of link will bring you a better result.

The Best links: The best kind of link you can get is one from a website that ends in .EDU or .GOV these are, it is believed, to be links that are the best to have.  Part of the reason is that they are next to impossible to obtain due to the nature of the sites.  EDU sites are educational, and usually only have links to sites or pages that they know are of value.  The same is true for a GOV or government sites.  If your able to get a link from any of these kinds of domains take it, it is worth gold to the search engines.

Great Links: If your able to get a link from a news organization you can expect that you will not only see traffic increase but also a boost to your sites ranking.  News sites are generally ever changing and checked very often by the SE’s the more times you show up in links in News sites, especially the big ones, the better your going to rank and the more traffic your going to get.

The Next Best links: The next level of links are links that are one way to your site. The more people linking to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The SE’s keep track of how many links come into your site, the more links coming in the more important they believe your site to be. To a certain degree you can not control what sites link to your site so there is no real disadvantage to having an incoming link from any site.

Links in Directories: I will explain further in another article the value of registering your site with as many directories as you can find out there.  Suffice to to say that it falls into the category above where the more links coming in the better.

Link Exchange: This is where you seek out sites that will trade a link on your site for a link on their site.  This is also a subject I will discuss in another article in greater detail as it is an art form all to itself.

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The main key to links is to trade links with sites that fit the theme of your site. Take a look at my coffee site.  Down near the bottom you will find a links of interest link which takes you to an index of my link categories.  You will notice that the links are with sites that are related to coffee.  These would be things like Kitchen stuff, Dinning Room things, Coffee sites, Gourmet Foods, and other sites that are related in some manner to coffee, the theme of my site.

The other thing is to not link with what we call link farms. Link farms are sites that link with just about anything.  They are easy to spot because before you ask for a link from a site you want to look at their links.  If they are links that are relevant to their site and your link is relevant then you have a fit, pop them a message asking for a mutual link.  See links that do not fit their theme, stay away and look at another site.

The second thing you want to do is have different kinds of links out there. You do not want to have the same link everywhere on the net.  The SE’s notice this and it is partly how they end up ranking your site and what it has to do with.  So using a variety of sample links that sites can put on their site is important.  Even minor word changing is fine.  Move a sentence around, change the alt text for the link, get as many variations as you can.

Next is how do you find links? Well you can do it the old fashioned way and go to a site similar to yours and start looking at the sites that they have in their links of interest area or use a SE.  Follow the rules of are they relevant, are they a link farm, and if they like your site, they will probably link with you.  Many sites have forms you can fill in or an email address specifically for links.  I like to always tell them that I have added them and if they reply with where my link is located at I will make it permanent link.  The formation of a good links letter can mean the difference between getting links and not getting them.

There are other alternatives to hunting up sites yourself. There are companies, such as mine that for a fee will find you links and keep finding them.  One of the important things about links is it is an always going activity. The more links you get coming to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The more links on other sites the more important your site is to the WEB.

Customers going to one website DO look at links and follow them. While no endorsement is implied and even expressly denied, it means something to a browser that if they are good enough to be on this site they must be ok factor is in the mind of the consumers mind when they come to yours.  My coffee site lives off of links with other sites. I track where clicks are coming from and most of them are through links with other sites.

The other way to get links is get a program that will search the web for you. A number of them are out there one that I happen to like is called Zeus .  It can be programed with keywords that are relevant to your site, and even negative or exclusion words to look for.  Basically you tell it what to look for, what to avoid, where to start and it goes out and follows links and ranks sites.  If a site ranks well enough it puts it in a look at file.  The speed it scours the net depends on your connection and a variety of factors but in no time at all you can have lots of incominge and out going links.  Then you just need to look at the sites it finds and if they fit, it will send them your prepared email and even upload the links.  Some will even do a pretty good job of tracking to make sure your links are still out there.

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Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.

Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes.  The first is that it brings in customers to your site.  Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.

SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders.  These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net.  One way they find it is when you submit your site to them.  The other is they find your site through a link on another site.  The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there.  Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s.  Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest.  They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing.  Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free.  This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.

The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site.  These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it.  I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.

There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you.  Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often.  It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site.  If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.

You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site.  Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders.  This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can.  I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories.  The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better.  Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.

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According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

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What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks indicates the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a particular keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When there is a banklink to your site come from other sites, and those sites have information that is related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The relevant the inbound link, the greater their quality.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques such as automatically generated pages whose purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In a link exchange, one website places a link on their website that points to another website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted.  This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. You could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We should begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being as careful as we can with which websites we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are relevant to others, sometimes they are not.  Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your link exchange or backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks. There are tools to help you keep track of your backlinks and make links with other sites.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink.  This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

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Google allows webmasters and owners to track information that google itself is storing about websites it crawls. The information is vast and can be used to help further target your market and make your site perform better in the SE’s for SERP.

Google allows you to submit directly to google sitemaps of your site for their bots to crawl and index. This is probably one of the most useful tools as it assures you that your site is submitted and all the pages that google should crawl get crawled and hopefully indexed.  That is the other very interesting thing is that when it does crawl the sitemap it tells you how many pages are indexed by google.  Hopefully the two are the same but if they are not, then you know there are pages to do some work on.

Google also tells you other things about your site. Like do you have duplicate page titles, content, various other sorts of things that it finds as negative about your site. This is usually why some pages are not properly indexed.  As an example my Coffee-n-Caffeine.com website had some short meta tags.  Not something that was too big a deal on a site with almost 2o0 pages to not have 10 of them properly indexed.  However since I found that and I fixed that now all the pages are indexed by google.

Google also provides information about what people are searching for which they have clicked on your link to go to your site from google. This information is invaluable, it shows what people are looking for that leads them to you, and also what they are not finding you for.  The details that google provides to the webmasters and owners of sites can be of tremendous value in futhering your SERP and also your market share.
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