By Robert Lockard

Google could soon change the rules of keyword Internet marketing with the debut of its new Google Caffeine search engine. Right now, Google is not doing a good job of searching through social-media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. So the company is working on a new version of its popular search engine that will add them to the mix and shake up other sites’ rankings for certain keywords.

The online marketing firm 360i released a study a little while back in a blog entry on Digital Connections, entitled, “6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a ‘Caffeine’ Boost.” In the post, SEO Group Director Mike Dobbs and SEO Analyst Martha Mukangara noted some pretty surprising findings.

They included 40 retail keywords in their study of the differences between the first three pages of regular Google search results and Google Caffeine search results. The 40 keywords are made up of 10 major brand names (keywords), 10 retail head terms (single keywords), 10 retail torso terms (two-word phrases), and 10 retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases).

They pointed out six ways the new search engine will dramatically affect online marketers’ strategies. For instance, 15 percent of all first-page rankings were different for the 40 keywords used in the study. Amazingly, the single keywords and two-word phrases saw 50 percent of their first-page results change with the new search engine.

The reason for this big change is the fact that Google Caffeine is focusing more on keyword relevance and it’s steering away from blogs and wikis in favor of social media, video, music, photo and other sites previously outside of its search capability.

Since single keywords are so general, they will face more competition from these new sites being allowed to vie for top ranking. Longer phrases, with four or more keywords, will benefit from the new system because they will be drawn from a smaller pool with a focus on how relevant they are to the searcher’s needs.

All of these changes could have serious consequences for ecommerce marketers. At the end of the article, the study’s authors give the following advice to them:

Marketers will need to keep a close eye on their own set of keywords and determine how results change if a switch-over does takes place… [I]f your keywords shift in rank, you will need to refresh your strategy and focus in on any results drop-offs, or take advantage of subsequent wins.

What an interesting topic. Be sure to keep coming back to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for the latest updates on Google and Bing, as well as other major search-engine trends.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog entry, “Internet marketers brace for Google Caffeine changes.” The photo of the upside-down YouTube page is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of engineroomblog.

By Robert Lockard

The other day, I had an image in my mind of a strange object and I wanted to find a picture of it online. The only problem was I didn’t have a clue what it was called. The image in my head was of a scene in “Superman II” when General Zod’s henchman Non is in the Oval Office and he’s staring intently at something. It’s five metal balls tied to strings in a row and the ones on either end keep hitting the four still balls, causing the ball on the other end to bounce away and come back again.

Maybe you already know what I’m talking about.

I turned to one of my coworkers here at eHarbor, Inc. and asked her to help me. She could picture it, as well, but she couldn’t put her finger on the name. I tried searching for “metal ball attached to strings hitting each other” on Google, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. Luckily, my resourceful coworker found it on Amazon.com, I believe. I could now put a name to an image – Newton’s cradle!

This story illustrates my need for a visual search engine and not simply a text-based one. Luckily, Microsoft and Google are both heading in that direction. I read about their efforts in a CNN article entitled, “Microsoft, Google expand search-engine tools.”

None of the Bing Visual Search galleries look like they would help me find Newton’s cradle because they mostly include people, entertainment and electronics. But it’s new, so I’m willing to cut Microsoft some slack. I’m sure they will get better as they get a feel for what people are (literally) looking for.

Microsoft is still trying hard to break Google’s domination of the search-engine market. The CNN article cited a comScore study showing that, in June, about 65 percent of online searches were done through Google, while just 8.4 percent were done through Bing.

I’ve talked about the race between Microsoft and Google to develop a stronghold over a variety of online and software industries before. You can read about it in my blog entry, “Google-Microsoft face-off good for ecommerce.” Their rivalry is bringing great innovations like these visual search engines. I’ll hopefully talk more about Google’s Fast Flip in a forthcoming blog entry. For now, I’ll say adieu.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog entry, “Finding Superman image on Google no easy feat.” The photo of Newton’s cradle is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of ƒяαиcєscα яσsє.

By Britnee Nguyen

SEO… It’s been around since the creation of the internet, but hasn’t really become a focus of companies to use until five years ago. Search engine optimization has successfully helped hundreds of companies reach high on search engine lists to get noticed more by on-line users.

Different strategies are used such as including keywords in page headers, titles, hyperlinks, navigation bar, ALT description and META tags. Another important valuable tactic is to use unique content writing. The actual content with keywords inserted that are posted on websites can help increase traffic flow and improve sales. Because not only does it provide an avenue to display keywords, but those who visit the website will notice the quality of it too.

There are a few things you should look for when writing SEO-quality content. First, make sure your content is not duplicated or copied from somewhere else. This includes even just a sentence or phrase; it could affect your rankings. Original content is the best way to go to and preferably by a real human being – not a robot.

If you have a robot or foreigners write your content, it most likely won’t have completely correct grammar and good word usage. Hiring a person with a background in writing, English, or journalism will give you better assurance that they will do a good job and write content that will draw viewers in. For example, Submit Solution has a content team that was specifically hired to write quality content for their websites. If they had outsourced, they might not be guaranteed they will get what they are looking for.

One last thing – when writing, be sure to keep in mind who your audience is. If you write very informal on a medical website, then viewers will not be impressed and not think it’s professional and won’t purchase services. If you wrote the content in a formal voice for the medical site, then it will fit better for the company and its customers. So not only should you write SEO content just for search engines, but you should cater it to your readers as well.

Flickr Photo Credit: Linda Cronin

By Robert Lockard

This is a follow-up to my previous blog entry, “How to improve your SEO through links.” I’m talking about what I learned at Webmarketing123’s August 5, 2009 Webinar, “Advanced SEO Webinar: Linking Best Practices.” Without further ado, I’ll return to where I left off.

Unless a website is cached or saved by search engines on a regular basis, the links found on it won’t count toward the search engine optimization of the sites it links to. That explains why Google can’t keep up with Twitter and other social-media sites, as I discussed in an earlier eHarbor Blog entry. It’s trying to take a snapshot of websites that change multiple times every second. Search engines will have to get creative to solve that problem in their methodology.

Returning to caches, I learned a cool trick at the Webinar that I would like to share. If you want to know if a Web page is cached by Google, all you have to do is type “cache:www.thesitename.com” into a Google search and it will tell you. Sites that are cached by Google can be useful in generating SEO because they are actually read by Google. You shouldn’t waste your time trying to get links on sites that offer no real SEO value. This is a good way to test them.

The big question is how do you get inbound links? After you’ve gone through and added great content that is relevant to your keywords, you can start using the following sources to get inbound links:

- Directories

- Paid Listings

- Article Syndications

- Blogs

- News Releases

By using a diversity of methods to obtain inbound links, you make your site look better to search engines. If you focus too much on any one source of links, search engines can dock you. Don’t add links too fast. That also looks bad to search engines. Spread your growth across a period of time instead of trying to do it all in one quick surge.

You should be aware that some sites are better than others, when it comes to getting links from them. Here are some criteria to keep in mind when selecting which sites to try to get inbound links from:

- Domain Authority – How long the website has existed.

- Rank – Where the website stands on Google, Bing and Yahoo searches for targeted keywords.

- Spam – How professional or “spammy” the site looks.

- Other Links – If the site contains links to other respectable sources in your industry.

- Similar Content – How the site’s content compares to your own. The closer the better.

That’s pretty much what I learned at this informative Webinar. I highly recommend you check out Webmarketing123’s free Webinars. And I also recommend you keep coming back to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for frequent updates on Internet marketing and ecommerce strategies.

This is a complete version of the post on the eHarbor Blog: “How to get inbound links.” The photo of the fingers touching light is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of littledan77.

By Jeff Ashby

During my experience as a website developer and SEO technician, I have never found anything quite like Wordpress. Not only for its ease of use, but also for its capabilities to help your website gain spots in the search rankings.

For those who don’t know, Wordpress is a powerful blogging software (or platform) which makes creating and maintaining a weblog extremely easy. However, not only can it be used for blogs. It can be used as a CMS (Content Management System) to build an entire website. Some of you might have heard of similar platforms such as Blogspot or Typepad, however neither of these has a candle to the power and ease of Wordpress. Since discovering Wordpress, I have used it religiously to build all of my own websites as well as clients’ websites as it is easy for me and they to modify content, change the site design, and in my most importantly, gain SEO rankings.

But what makes Wordpress such a powerful utah SEO tool? In the next several posts, I am going to make the case for why you should build your next website in Wordpress and how to make it as Search Engine Friendly as possible.

I am going to try to break this down into several sections, including powerful plugins, link building techniques, and basic strategy inside the Wordpress engine itself to make the search engines (and everyone else) find your content and drive traffic to your website.

In this initial post, I would like to just talk about the barebones Wordpress platform. The latest version can be downloaded at www.wordpress.org and installed on any Apache server. After installing and logging into the Wordpress Administration section for the first time, there are several SEO features we need to activate.

First, go to Settings > Permalinks

Permalinks will allow us to modify the URLs of our website pages to make them more search engine friendly. For example, the default setting would create a URL like the following:

http://www.jeffashby.com/?p=123

We can create a custom structure that will give us the name of the post instead. I like to add the category and post name by using this code: /%category%/%postname%/

http://www.jeffashby.com/wordpress/the-wonderful-world-of-wordpress-seo-part-1/

This creates a keyword rich URL that is not only more helpful for search engines, but also more helpful to visitors of your website.

Another cool feature about the Permalinks is if you actually go into a post that you write, right below the post title, you will be able to modify the URL of each post anyway you want. That is enough about permalinks.

Second, try going to Settings > Privacy.

This will give us the option to enable or disable search engines from viewing your website. You might be thinking “Why would I ever want to disallow crawlers from my site?” The truth is, when your site is in development, it is a good idea to now allow your content to be added to the search engines. In many situations, you might have development content that gets indexed that you don’t want indexed (and it is sometimes hard to remove indexed content). Just make sure that when your page is done, go back and switch the search engine crawlers back on.

Lastly, I want to talk about pinging. Go to Settings > Writing and scroll to the bottom where you see Update Services.

One of the amazing features of Wordpress is that it has the ability to call spiders to your website. Once you create a new post or page, Wordpress will send a message out to the different search engines and content websites and basically say “Hey, there is new content on my website, come check it out.” This is called pinging.

In this section of the administration, we can add a list of different websites that we want Wordpress to ping other than just the default websites. Currently this is the list I use:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://zing.zingfast.com

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://www.weblogues.com

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.snipsnap.org

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.popdex.com

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://www.lasermemory.com

http://www.imblogs.net/ping/

http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://www.catapings.com/ping.php

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.blogroots.com

http://www.blogpeople.net

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.a2b.cc

http://weblogues.com/RPC/

http://weblogues.com/ping/

http://wasalive.com/ping/

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://topicexchange.com

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.twingly.com

http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rcs.datashed.net

http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc

http://popdex.com/addsite.php

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://pingoat.com/

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://ping.wordblog.de/

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.namaan.net/rpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.fc2.com/

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php

http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://newsblog.jungleboots.org/ping.php

http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://mod-pubsub.org

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://imblogs.net/ping/

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://hamo-search.com/ping.php

http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://catapings.com/ping.php

http://bulkfeeds.net

http://blogupdate.org/ping/

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blogsnow.com/ping

http://blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://blogpeople.net/ping

http://blogoon.net/ping/

http://blogoole.com/ping/

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogdb.jp

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blog.goo.ne.jp

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping/

http://bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php

http://bblog.comping.php

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

You could probably find more than this, but this is a pretty good list. You can just copy and paste this list into this section and Wordpress will do all the work in order to get more spiders looking at your content. With JeffAshby.com, I am at the point where I can submit a new post, and less than 5 minutes later, it is already indexed into Google. This is just an example of the power that Wordpress can give your website in terms of SEO.

This information is a good opening to some of the powers of Wordpress. In the next post, I am going to discuss more about important plugins that are crucial to your SEO success.

This article was originally posted at The Wonderful World of Wordpress SEO – Part 1 at JeffAshby.com

Photo credit: www.inmagine.com

By Britnee Nguyen

Microsoft released Bing (formerly known as MSN Search) just a few months ago with more than $80 million being spent in promoting it. An issue that has been brought up was whether the SEO rankings of companies would be affected. If Bing becomes more increasingly popular, then companies will need to start catering their utah SEO techniques to it or else they’ll lose out on searches being made there.

Bing is still fairly new so many are waiting to see its long-term effects. Right now, some are saying it’s a good idea for companies to make the extra effort within the next year to increase ranking to take advantage of Bing’s advertising push for utah online marketing. Since Bing is paying so much money right now promoting itself, its bound to have a lot of traffic flowing through at this time.

Companies could take advantage of this new venture by jumping on to get more higher rankings on Bing. Google is still the number one search engine and will most likely always popular, but Bing is working hard to become a household name. They recently just partnered with Yahoo’s utah search engine marketing and will be working together.

Although Microsoft’s efforts are admirable, I’m not sure if Bing will hold out for as long as Google has. Google has made such a statement that they’ve become a verb such as, “Google it.” They have such a strong presence that I even went to Google to search “What is Bing?” and look for news and blog posts about it. It was only after that I decided to go to bing.com itself.

That’s just my own personal experience, but I’m sure there have been others who have become hooked on it since it’s the new thing. Even though I don’t think Bing will be as strong as Google, I still think it’s a good idea for companies to get involved with it during this popularity burst. And if Bing does end up being a top search engine, then companies will benefit more receiving traffic from more than just Google.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Here’s the scenario: You’re searching for information on the most poisonous spider in the world, the black recluse, which you’ve recently learned has been found in an area near your home.  Desperate for information that may help you protect yourself and your family from the dangerous arachnid, you type in “brown recluse” in a search engine bar.  As the information is populating, several articles on the effects of the spider’s poison, the origins and known locations, or other subjects pulls up, looking very promising.  Then there are the pictures.  Lots of pictures of the huge, brown and black spider and even the damage its bite inflicts on the human body.  Which of the two would draw your eye?

Most likely, you would immediately move your cursor over the picture, possible exclaiming something like, “Gross!”, and would possible spend the next few minutes sharing the images with your friends and coworkers.

Recent studies on the browsing habits of search engine users confirms that people will consume information through pictures more than 30% faster than with regular text.  Why would someone knowingly skip over interesting pictures like graphs, charts and other images, utah online marketing in favor of reading a full-length blog post on the subject?  Some just might, but most won’t.

Image searches account for hundreds of millions of searches on Google everyday.  By optimizing the images on your site, you can tap into this market and begin a new side of Search Engine Optimization for your company.

Here are a few ways you can optimize your images to generate traffic.

Name the Image Correctly: An accurate name that describes the picture in brief, simple language is important, and will ensure that your image is pulled up in a relevant search.

Use Keywords: Keywords are another important factor.  Properly describing the image with keywords and alternate keyword tags will increase the power of your photo and increase its searchability.

Place Images Near Relevant Content: The best location for an image is surrounded by relevant content, like in a blog post.  This will increase the organic ranking of your photo within search engines.

Optimizing your photos can be a great source of traffic for your site!  These simple guidelines take very little time to implement, so start following them today to get the results you’re looking for.

By Robert Lockard

I enjoy Webmarketing123’s free Webinars on Internet marketing. I always learn a lot from them, and I try to apply what I learn. I’ve discussed several Webinars in the eHarbor Blog, most recently in my blog entry, “Experts are wrong: Twitter and Facebook help SEO.” In that post, I said I didn’t agree with one of their ideas about social media, but most of the time I appreciate their insights.

Today, I’ll talk about what I learned at their August 5, 2009 Webinar, “Advanced SEO Webinar: Linking Best Practices.”

The five things a website needs to get ranked on the first page of Google results are:

1. Keywords – These are the search terms you want people to type into a search engine in order to find your Web page.

2. Site Content – You need to use your chosen keywords in your website’s text to show search engines your site is relevant to those topics.

3. Meta Content – You don’t usually see this content, but it must be there in the backend of your site and in your Web page titles for your site to be fully optimized.

4. URLs – Include important keywords in your URLs. For instance, it is much better to have a URL like www.eharborinc.com/blog/2009/07/17/is-twitter-overhyped, which includes the date and headline keywords, than something like www.eharborinc.com/blog/post-81. The second URL gives no clue as to what it contains, while the first one gives a much better idea of the page’s subject matter.

5. Inbound Links – These are links (or votes) from other websites to your site. Search engines look at both the number and quality of the links you receive from other sites.

This Webinar focused on the importance of inbound links and how to improve their quality and impact on your search-engine rankings. After you have created an excellent site, with top-notch content on a well-defined subject, you can start working on getting links from relevant websites and forums.

Three important principles to remember in your links are:

1. Make sure the anchor text, or the text that is hyperlinked, describes the page it is linking to.

2. Provide supporting material near the anchor text to further describe what the linked page contains.

3. Be as specific as possible where you send links to. Avoid sending links to homepages unless you have a good reason for doing so.

This blog entry is getting long, so I think I’ll have to cut it short and finish it in a second part. Stay tuned to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for more updates on how to use search engines in your Internet marketing strategy.

This is a complete version of the blog entry on the eHarbor Blog: “I link, therefore I am… on top of Google.” The photo of the confusing keyboard arrows is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of jeremyfoo.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

September 8th, 2009

The extreme growth of social media users in the past year has prompted the development of a new kind of internet marketing. Instead of emailing stories they like, people are “digging” and “tweeting” them. The importance of websites and blog posts are determined by the votes of readers on Reddit and Delicious. People can follow many of their favorite brands on Twitter and become their fan on Facebook. This intense boom in social media use begs the question, “Where did this all come from?”

The popularity and hype of social media marketing has taken away from the traditional marketing focus on search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads. Utah SEO and utah PPC have fallen into the background while social media shines with all its glamour. Although social media marketing has proven to be useful, it cannot stand alone. All the followers in the world will not generate the amount of traffic that a great Google ranking can! Until search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! decide to index every tweet in their rankings, SEO must be part of internet marketing. The trick to creating an effective marketing plan for your business is to combine traditional SEO tactics with fresh, new social media methods.

Here are some of the important “can” and “cannot” features of social media:

Social Media can…

Help you engage your customers. Social media allows your company to engage with the public in a casual, conversational way. You can find out so much about your potential clientele through this mode of communication! This is reciprocated as your customers learn more about your company through your conversations.

Help you build a following. Connections with your customers through social media outlets give you more opportunities to build sales through word-of-mouth reviews. It is also a great way to resolve questions and concerns in a way that will build trust with other readers. Social media is great for building awareness for your brand.

Social Media cannot…

Be the sole source of traffic for your site. Relying solely on social media networks to bring traffic to your site is foolish! In a recent presentation by @HubSpot titled “How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation,” they revealed that while three social media sites accounted for about 15% of all traffic to their site, Google alone provided over 22%! This means that while social media is certainly on the rise, search engines still provide the largest source of traffic.

Get your site ranked. Twitter, the fastest growing social media site, is filled with internet marketers promoting their brand. While this is a great method of driving traffic to your site, it is invisible to all outside of the Twitter world. Google do not index activity on Twitter! Therefore, Twitter, and other social media activity, does not help to promote your business through search engines. Most people rely on search engines to bring them to the information they’re seeking. To take part in that, you need to use SEO tactics to give your site a great organic ranking and, therefore, a piece of the pie.

Despite all its glitter and appeal, social media is not a one-stop solution for internet marketing. Search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads may seem outdated amidst all the social hype, but don’t abandon SEO! These traditional methods take advantage of the search engine traffic that social media cannot access. In the dynamic industry of internet marketing, it’s important to stay on top of all the latest trends, so stay tuned for more SEO and social media tips!

By Robert Lockard

The Bing decision engine is the most-visible sign of competition between Microsoft and Google, but the two technology giants are competing in many ways besides their search engines. And online companies and users are benefiting from their rivalry.

According to a Wired magazine article, “Google vs. Microsoft: What you need to know,” there are several ways Microsoft and Google are trying take market share from each other. I’ll discuss how some of those ways could be good for us who work in ecommerce and Internet marketing.

For instance, Google’s online advertising services, through Adsense, have taken pay-per-click campaigns to a new level. This service allows many websites to post paid-search ads from Google and earn money when someone clicks on one of them. This allows these sites to translate visitors into revenue, and it also helps Google earn money on its advertising campaigns. Web marketers benefit from the added exposure, allowing them to reach more online users than ever before.

Microsoft is trying to get into this market with Bing cashback. It has yet to become profitable, like Google, in the arena of online advertising, but the additional competition could mean lower advertising rates and better service for Internet marketers. I discussed Bing at length in an eHarbor Blog entry, “Bing decision engine good for online marketing.”

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has already had plenty of competition from Mozilla Firefox, Google’s new Chrome browser is sure to push them to innovate even more.

By the way, as I read this article, I noticed a glaring grammatical error that called out for me to comment on. Here’s the sentence:

It is, however, not a death match — it’s more of an fight to see who will be the King of Technology…

So close. By the way, this is a complete version of the blog entry on the eHarbor Blog: “Google-Microsoft face-off benefits ecommerce.” The Google vs. Microsoft photo is from Flickr, and it is courtesy of michperu.