$300 or Free...um, er...Give Me a Moment

"You get what you pay for" is usually a pretty good dictum to follow. But the Internet often negates that truism. Certainly one of the most startling aspects of 21st century life, if you stop to think about it, is the amount of free resources available on the web.

So it amused me yesterday when I overheard a couple of young entrepeneurs enthusing about an application they had just purchased. It promised to help them find and follow large numbers of Twitter users based on topics they tweet about. They were thrilled that it got them 60 new followers the first day. And they only paid $300 for it!

I went back to my office and checked my results for a TwitSeeker search I had setup before going to lunch. It had found me over 180 pre-qualified Twitter followers while I chewed my Jamaican jerk chicken.

$300 versus free...where's my calculator so I can figure the ROI?

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Virante does social web, SEO & SEM right: www.virante.com

AdBloc Considering New Meta Tag Standard Proposed by Virante Blogger

AdBlock Plus, provider of the leading browser plugin for blocking display ads on web sites, has announced in a blog post today that they are considering introducing an option that would be a modified form of a ad-blocking meta tag first proposed on Virante, Inc.'s blog, TheGoogleCache. Read about this development here.

Virante is an innovative, multi-channel Internet marketing company based in Durham, NC.

Website Launch Flowchart

This flowchart is a detailed guide that covers optimized website design, development and multichannel marketing integration. Web design doesn't exist in a vacuum nor does marketing. The most optimized, easiest functioning and best performing sites are those that find a balance between design, content, business tool complexity and marketing integration. 

Download this free chart.

Using Google Analytics to Track Social Networks

Ran Nir at econsultancy.com has posted a great, easy-to-follow tutorial on how to track links to your site (or your clients' sites) from social media sites.

For professional, proven results with your social media campaigns, check out Virante.

BackTweets Finds Links to You on Twitter

If you're at all serious and savvy about using Twitter as a marketing tool, you probably do regular searches for mentions of your brand, using Twitter's own search tool or one of the many third party tools available. That's a good thing to do, but you've probably been missing a significant portion of Twitter refrences to your brand: those with a direct link to one of your sites but no mention of your brand in the text.

Enter BackTweets. Enter your base URL (e.g., http://www.yoursite.com) and BackTweets will find any link to that site posted on Twitter. Good news: BackTweets can "see through" shortened URLs. Any URL search you create with BackTweets has its own RSS feed so you can keep track of new linkers. To get that in your email, submit the RSS to FeedMyInbox.

Are You a Social Media Failure?

[From imediaconnection.com] "Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness." - Oprah Winfrey

Market research firm Gartner projects that more than 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with websites will attempt some kind of online social media initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. Gartner also projects that 50 percent of those efforts will fail. 

Recognizing failure and learning from it is the nature of our business, especially for emerging channels such as social media. Repeatedly, it is a brave few who take risks while the rest point fingers and follow. When a company does dare to risk, we are quick to judge and condemn rather than celebrate. 

To be realistic, most of us are accountable to multiple stakeholders -- brands, consumers, our own organizations, and colleagues. There are, however, ways to minimize risks, learn from the stumbles, and move forward without leaving a trail of flames.

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Is Your Social Media Marketing Breaking the Law?

[From seomoz.org] The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has some rules about online marketing that may surprise you - they certainly surprised me.

Recently, SEOmoz's own Sarah Bird was interviewed by Eric Enge on a wide variety of contract and legal topics. As I was proudly browsing through the piece, I was especially curious about what Sarah had to say around marketing on social media networks:

“(the FTC) made clear that online advertisers are covered by rules about so called stealth marketing. This basically means that if it's not obvious that the advertiser is being paid to do this advertisement, there needs to be a disclaimer saying he or she is in fact being financially compensated."

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Social Media Marketing: Where are the Measurables?

(From clickz.com:) In its simplest form, SEO (define) is a three-step process: break down crawling barriers to help the engines efficiently index a Web site; craft keyword-targeted content that appeals to search engines and visitors alike; and, most critical, practice link-building for targeted terms and phrases.

Social media optimization, on the other hand, is primarily about knocking down the walls of user-generated content to be a dynamic part of an online community. It's not a simple process and it takes time. Just because a "Digg This" button has been added to a blog or Web site doesn't mean every post or product is compelling enough to be considered socially buzzworthy.

Social media is just another liberating facet of content optimization tactics that can lure in thousands of new visitors and hundreds of inbound links. When it works, it's scalable. But it doesn't always work in a predictable manner.

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The What, How & Who of Selecting an SEO Firm

From searchenginewatch.com - Buying into SEO is a difficult process. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO, it's really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.

Many companies looking for SEO help -- even those with a decent understanding of SEO -- try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

  1. What is this firm going to do for me?
  2. How much do they cost? 

When you're hiring for a particular position in any business, you're looking at that individual's background. You aren't just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You're hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house optimizer). By selecting an agency or employee purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.

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Check out Virante as an example of a firm that meets and exceeds the criteria in this article.

On Click Pixel Tracking

(From theGoogleCache.com:) One of the most common methods of tracking conversions and visits is through “Pixel Tracking”. Essentially, a single pixel image is included on a page that, when triggered, gives the user some form of cookie or results in his/her her browser IP / user-agent / etc. stored in a tracking database somewhere.

Well, what if you wanted to use that pixel to track something else? Like a file download, a mouseover, or a click on a particular outbound link? How do you make sure the pixel image gets included and loaded before the redirect takes place without making Timeout assumptions?

Here is some simple scripts to help you accomplish just that…

Javascript in Head

The following code snippet should be placed between the start and close head tags of your page. These functions are responsible for inserting the tracking pixel onto your page and then setting an Interval to check it every 1/5th second to make sure it loads. Once it is loaded, it redirects the individual on to the target URL.

function clktrk(url) {

pxlsrc = "http://your.tracking.pixel.jpg";


window.clkurl = url;

document.getElementById('clkimg').src=pxlsrc;

window.intval=setInterval("isImgComplete()",200);

}




function isImgComplete() {

document.getElementById('working').innerHTML = document.getElementById('working').innerHTML + " .";

var img = document.getElementById('clkimg');


window.timer = window.timer+200;

if(!img.complete) { return false; }

if (typeof img.naturalWidth != "undefined" && img.naturalWidth == 0) { return false; }

else {

window.clearInterval(intval);


location.href=window.clkurl;

}

}

Javascript on Your Links

Instead of a traditional a href=”http://www.yourlink.com”, use the code below…

Your Link

Footer Image

At the bottom of the page, include the following HTML.

<img id='clkimg' height='1' width='1' />

Optimizing Body Text for Google

From thekeywordacademy.com: Before we can talk about how to optimize the body text of the page you’re working on, we should probably define what body text is. To put it simply, body text is the text that you can see on a web page. Everything you can see on this post would be considered to be body text.

The technical explanation of what body text is would be everything that appears between the opening body tag, , and the closing body tag, , in the code for the page.

Bloggers don’t really need to worry about the technical explanation - you can think of body text as a combination of your post title and the main body of your post, or as the text that appears on your blog’s homepage.

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Easy Linking for SEO Boost

From BizArticleZone.com: Search engine optimization is a process, one that must always be revisited and adapted as search algorithms are changed by the search engines. Seo is evolving much faster that SEO companies can adapt, and this is a fact not loudly stated and never mentioned to clients. Today Seo is about getting quality traffic, making great websites findable and usable, and most of all is merging with conversion science. Search Engine Optimization is a combination of activities spanning from the initial stages of production and extends beyond launching of the site.

SEO experts analyze the keywords or phrases the user is likely to search information for your company and accordingly optimizes your website making your website search engine friendly. Search engine optimization includes but not limited to keyword research and optimization, content analysis, link building and search engine marketing. Website promotion and strategy sound expensive and time-consuming, but they don’t have to be.Optimize your web pages to be user and search-engine friendly. Easy navigation and fast-loading pages keep surfers happy.

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