I’ve been hearing arguments either manufactured by, or misunderstood by non-SEO’s that Pinterest had surpassed Facebook and Twitter in traffic. Unique daily visitors on Pinterest are certainly high, but they’re nowhere near Facebook. That said, Pinterest has enjoyed an explosive 4,000% growth over just a six month period.

Pinterest's unique site visitor stats Feb, 2012

So there’s a nice strong upward trend (great initial growth curve) but Twitter, just this year has gone from 24,000,000 to 37,000,000 which is a 13 million unique visitor gain so far this year (not including long term repeat visitor traffic).

Pinterest vs Twitter graph (via Compete.com) Feb 20, 2012

Facebook, on the other hand isn’t threatened at all by Pinterest, though Pinterest does have that nice sweet curve all startup sites do when they first go viral:

Pinterest vs Facebook (via Compete.com) Feb 20, 2012

Facebook has climbed from 134,000,000 unique visitors to 166,890,779 visitors this year so far, a gain of almost 23 million visitors… but just the overall numbers as of Feb 20th 2012 aren’t showing them clearly in the lead:

• Pinterest:       16,230,441
• Twitter:          37,201,228
• Facebook: 166,890,779

So while Pinterest is highly rated as trusted by women, it is not the overall number one social media site and has in now way suddenly surpassed Facebook. Not even close.

However, as with all new growing social media sites, anywhere anyone thinks they can charge you a quick buck to “jump on the bandwagon” and to “keep up with the Jones’” (those other businesses that have more customers than you), and, if that doesn’t work, the horrible things that will happen if you don’t, and the wonderful things that will happen if you do… you know the routine – fear tactics and carrot on the stick tactics and that’s just for a start. I’m not even going into the “appeal to ego” or using infospeak and 3D charts – so here’s a few offers from a group I belong to in Linkedin:

Mostly spam posts in a Linkedin group offering out of this world results using Pinterest. Only problem is, this is an SEO group discussing Pinterest, not a lot of potential clients here, but idiot spammers sneak their way in everywhere.

Sugarrae says that the Pinterest TOS points out that Pinterest is using affiliate links to monetize products linked to from the site, and as Rae Hoffman-Dolan is an Affiliate Marketer herself she loves the idea and lauds Pinterest owners for monetizing in such a fashion. (While an Atlantic Magazine Sr Editor, Alexis Madrigal, points out the exact problem in the second image below).

So is all the marketing hype on the use of Pinterest valid? Is any of it true? And if so, how can it best be put to use in marketing?

About.com sent me an article written by By Darcie Connell (CEO of a travel site) on March 2, 2012 “Can you get 6,000 visitors a day from Pinterest?” with a five steps to success on Pinterest all laid out:

Step 1. Go Narrow.
Step 2. Go Deep.
Step 3. Meet Others on Pinterest.
Step 4. Add Useful, High Quality Photos to Your Site & to Pinterest
Step 5. Make it Easy for People To Find You on Pinterest.

Click here to read the details of how to make the five steps to Pinterest success work for you.

Hubspot also provides a nice PDF on how to use Pinterest for business which you may find helpful.

Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at Atlantic Magazine comments on Pinterests (outright) TOS disclosure.

Another important note when setting up an account for business mentioned in the PDF is “be sure to register your account with the same email address you use for your business’ Twitter account so you can easily share your new pins through your Twitter account, too. once you receive an invitation to sign up for pinterest, you’ll want to sign up through the Twitter option, not the facebook option. This will enable you to tie your pinterest account to your business’ Twitter account, not your personal facebook profile. currently, pinterest doesn’t offer a connection to facebook business pages.”

That said, there’s a lot more involved with Pinterest than meets the casual eye. Still with a “join by invite only” (which you can do by requesting one yourself) Pinterest needs to be taken a closer look at.

My personal advice here is to include clear, beautiful pictures of your happy customers (and workers) as well as new photos of your company events or interesting displays, product preparation, manufacturing or services. You don’t need to make them formal, as long as they’re quality.

Include Infographics too if you have them. Make sure you don’t just link to your site in your descriptions but to specific pages where the picture (and product) lives and don’t be afraid to ask for a sale, or ask for a “click this link to go to out blog” or some other calls to action. If you’re not using Web 2.0 technology like a blog or a forum then consider it now, it’s 2012, make sure your potential customers have a place to engage you, your company, and each other.

Latest UPDATE – Pinterest – 04/21/2012

Has The Pinterest Skyrocket Run out of Fuel?

Nicholas Carlson of businessinsider.com wrote on April 20th, 2012 that:

“Most Pinterest users sign-up to the site using their Facebook accounts, and AppData, which monitors how often users of third-party apps and Web sites interact with Facebook, says the number of Facebook-connected Pinterest users has declined precipitously the past 50 days (since April 20th or thereabouts). Monthly active users are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to 11.15 million on April 1 to just 8.3 million today.” Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

One Twitter user I follow (who’s posts are protected so I won’t use his name) posted: “Hey @Pinterest, you may want to jump on that first $1B offer – if it ever comes.”

The writing is on the wall.

You can already see the slow down headed for the down-swing as of this screen shot of activity for Pinterest on 3/20/2012:

Has The Pinterest Skyrocket Run out of Fuel?

But here’s what it looks like from 03/21/2012 to 04/20/2012:

Here's a chart showing the 3/21 to 4/20 portion of this 25% decline:

Pinterest vs Twitter vs Facebook – Social Media Site Popularity, Growth and Potential for Business Use is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

If I have a personal quirk then it’s that I like comparing search engine optimized web sites to racing cars. The reason why this is is because of all of the conceptual similarities. From the information superhighway (now with high speed internet) to the “finish line” (in our case page one in the search engine results), and the fact that anyone can own a car (whether it be a nice new expensive one or an old used clunker), or that in the highly competitive world of business racing and business websites it’s the one that’s been built best, driven by the best, and optimized by best that wins in the end.

The similarity doesn’t end there, but since this article is about long term vs short term search engine optimization suffice it to say that some businesses will benefit financially from short term SEO and get a steady satisfying number of clients from their web sites with a small investment (see competition below) and others will have a more difficult kind of race that needs to be won with a lot more competition spending a lot more money and time to be the winners.

That’s just the start though. Consider the first two factors mentioned above in my analogy between cars and web sites.

The site build relies to a degree on the website hosting platform. Good hosting with a modern control panel known as cPanel such as those used by Bluehost, Justhost and Hostmonster provide a myriad of exceptional benefits and features at low cost, with total ease and flexibility which make working on site development and expansion a true pleasure. Other hosting platforms like Plesk provide less flexibility, less control, and inevitably thwart the goals of the webmaster and search engine optimizer (often but not always two separate people).

Another factor is “the driver” or owner or manager of the business. The SEO should have control over the engineering of the site and SEOing of every element on the site, but it’s the owner or manager who turns it left or right and ultimately either takes the advice to pull it in for a pit-stop for gas or tires, or who gives the budget go ahead to get some necessary modifications done.

The owner/manager sometimes has the idea that the site should become something other than a site to make sales and would rather turn it into an extension of some personal private agenda to gain the admiration of friends on Facebook or Twitter. That will hold a site back as well. A lot of external links to causes and cluttered up pages full of things that don’t attract and convert new clients won’t do it. So the SEO who takes on the task of dealing with a site like that has only two choices:

1. Perform short term one time SEO and walk away or
2. Stay in it for the long haul and keep pushing for the changes required

But the decision there will (as in my case) often rely upon gut feelings.

1. Is the product or service good enough?
2. Does the product and brand have the chance of going national or global?
3. Is the business owner sincere and serious, and is there a real vision behind the company brand?

Whether you have a web site or are planning to have one some Search Engine Optimization is probably essential if you want to increase your web based income. That’s all there is to it. The first step is to evaluate the competition.

Competition

Let’s say you are building a microbrewery in NYC and you want to start now preparing your web site for optimization. So you sit down at your computer and type into Google “microbrewery in nyc” (without the quotations) and you come up with about 1,340,000 results. You also note that there aren’t any sidebar ads – or at least not more than one or two (depending upon whether they’ve used up their daily budget of clicks they’ll be there or have disappeared until tomorrow). So only 1.3 million competing pages and almost no advertisements… with three or four in the top showing in Google places, it looks like you’re not going to need to spend much on search engine optimization because there are enough people in the city to keep all of the microbreweries busy. No need for serious optimization – but you’ll want to have someone spend a few months on it, tweaking and refining, getting you links and jump-starting the process of bringing traffic and building awareness until nature picks up where the SEO leaves off, and then have the SEO monitor conditions once every quarter with a new analysis each time to make changes when Google changes its rules (what’s good today might be announced as bad tomorrow by Google – they do it all the time) and also to keep you informed in case one of your competitors is optimizing suddenly and looks like he’s going to knock you out of your spot.

How good is the talent handling your SEO?

There are multiple disciplines involved in turning a site into an internet sales juggernaut.

1. Email marketing (super scientific and one of the best ways to measure exactly what works and what doesn’t with people who have already pre-qualified themselves as potential clients if they’re not your clients already)
2. Marketing copywriting (sales pitches on the pages – whatever it is that convinces people your site and product are the right places to buy right now.
3. Back link building (hated by most, but some people out there love doing this and really thrive on the challenge. I like to think of them as gluttons for punishment)
4. Social Media Optimization – bringing in the traffic and working with the copywriter(s) if they’re not also writing copy.
5. Graphics designers – Another area requiring a ton of work and time, even if you’re using a stock photo site and not your own in-house photographers.
6. Videographers (Yes, video, sales pitches made in video can be very subtle or outright obnoxious – and Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google, which just so happens to own Youtube – so it’s part of SEO now too)

Those aren’t all of them by far, but unless the SEO has already done the above jobs and understands their importance and place in what he is doing, and understands that the talent may have their own lines that should not be crossed, then the SEO is going to be a problem.

If SEO alone brings 1,000 visitors to a site a day but less than 1% convert or take a desired action on the site, and changes to the site marketing copywriting result in a 10% drop in visitors arriving from the search engines but conversions or other desired actions increase to 2% of the total visitors to the site then the net increase is over 100% greater even though the total number of visitors has decreased. The SEO is still doing his or her job, but there must be cooperation with all of the other creatives during implementation.

Does this mean the SEO is losing control?

Absolutely not. The SEO doesn’t have the last say. The site owner doesn’t have the last say. The copywriter, the email marketer, and the graphics artist don’t have the last say. The last say is what the customer decides. And that’s where the SEO’s job is most important, in analyzing the site data, visitor patterns, conversion goals, A/B testing, and gathering information and making changes to the site based on customer responses in site surveys.

Wow doesn’t that sound great? A professionally built site on a great hosting platform with an owner manager who has vision and focus and a great SEO with enough talent around him or her to take a site to the highest level it can achieve, always up and forward and in the black!

The committed SEO who sticks around for the long haul in a company waiting for the opportunity when his influence will finally come to bear and he can turn it all around is worth his weight in gold. Markets with heavy competition, lots of paid advertising, national brand name competition and sites that obviously are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain (yes, these exist in more places than you might guess) require long term search engine optimization.

If you look at your own market niche and suspect that you need long term search engine optimization but all you can find are people interested in performing quick one two fixes for you, ask them to tell you honestly why. It may just be that it’s not you, but one of the other elements that’s not right. And if they can’t tell you that it’s one of those elements then ask them “Is it me, and if so what about me (or my company/product/service) and what can I do to make that different so it will work?” Because you know what? SEO is a career like any other and everyone needs to rack up successes to move onward and upward in the game.

Long Term vs Short Term Search Engine Optimization is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

There’s a set out there that needs to follow classical prescribed discipline in order to know how to function effectively. Discipline is how average and sub average people get past the malaise of mediocrity that is their doomed lot in life. Unfortunately the most disciplined people often leave good impressions simply because they emulate the expected look of success design from the cookie cutter mold so very well leaving an impression (a false impression) that is too good… they’re good looking fashion plates, true, but all you’ll ever get with them is unimaginative plain vanilla standard. The most standard car on the road won’t win the Indy or the Daytona. What wins is what breaks the mold in an intelligent way and for that to happen it has to be proven and the only way to prove it is to put it out on the track, let it go all out, and see what it can do.

Search Engine Optimization when done right has to follow certain rules but it also has to bend and make new rules based upon theories combining reasoning and complex concepts in ways they haven’t been combined before. With over 200 different factors in Google’s algorithm and (admittedly) over 1,000 factors in Bing’s algorithm the number of possible weighted in significance combinations of factors in SEO is staggering (imagine how many phone numbers can be made using just 10 digits – 3 for the area code and 7 for the actual number!). So putting on a suit and tie and getting a close cropped hair cut isn’t going to get you anything extra in SEO.

Live blogged from my Droid.

Why Rigid, Regimented, Anally Retentive SEO Doesn’t Win is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

New York City is all about people caring. It’s obvious in millions of small ways, dozens of times every day. SEO, for me, is my way of caring whether your business grows. SEO for you is caring whether your message reaches more people. SEO for your prospective clients means finding the right help they need to solve their own problems and the problems of their friends and loved ones.

I could stop there and leave it at that, but I won’t. Installing and configuring servers,routers, printers and networks is less work, less thought and more money than SEO, and I still do that to keep client’s businesses going. But installing a printer won’t be actively helping you make more money.

Live blogged from my Droid.

People Helping People is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

Dave Curtis (@SEO_NYC) has shared a Tweet with you: “Alysson: RT @TonyVerre: RT @RossHudgens: Does PPC help SEO? Maybe not, but if PPC helps SEO CTR and CTR helps SEO, PPC helps SEO. | BINGO.” –http://twitter.com/Alysson/status/170342206446645248

Live blogged from my Droid.

Pay Per Click Helps Search Engine Optimization! is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

SORRY IRS – NOTHING TO REPORT

Basic Rig for mounting cameras, mics and lights

My motto is “Work Smarter, Not Harder” which to me doesn’t just mean using my head on the job to get more done in less time and do a better job of it at the same time – it also means not doing the 9 to 5 bare minimum slave wage grind for a steady paycheck. Sorry – close to 18 years of tending bar for a living and getting tipped more for harder work has just spoiled me. I don’t work cheap. After working for the past 35 years in bartending and information technology for anything from between $14 to $45 per hour doing work that involves skilled and semi skilled labor I won’t take $6.00 an hour now. (Someone actually offered me $6.00 an hour, which is why I use that amount in specific).

That said – I’ve been continuing my focus on videography and thanks to a Youtube video makers channel I found, I’ve been able to save a few thousand dollars on essential professional equipment and join a Facebook Group dedicated to filmography on the cheap.

So I work a LOT smarter by never stopping learning at an accelerated rate – but I just don’t make any money doing it. Now. But later when the time comes I’ll have a LOT more to offer a prospective client/corporation than experience “cashiering at a Hess gas station” (and believe me, that job looks PRETTY good to me sometimes!).

So what else is new? Ordered a Fotodiox 5′x7′ Collapsible Chromakey Green + Blue 2-in-1 Background, Backdrop kit w/ Stand Support.

It folds like this:

…and now that I’ve got 4 full height lighting stands for my background and fill lights … here’s a few I’m finishing up making now:

Outside of my Ford Supervan named "Moby Dick" Full Height of Lighting (about 8 feet) but can safely go a foot higher I think

If I were to stop here I’d be kidding myself. So I went a step further and interviewed to volunteer at the County Government Broadcasting studio directed by one of the vidographers for the Larry King show (amongst others). A little paperwork and then a whole lot of free work worth about $100K per year learning how a small TV station operates from the ground up, computers and cameras.

As soon as I get back to NYC I should have enough behind me to become properly situated no matter where I go. Maybe I’ll headquarter in the East Village.

LOTS LEARNED – NOTHING EARNED is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

Between a friend’s divorce and helping her move (and losing her as a steady client in the turmoil until her business can be moved and formulating can resume), my 91 year old mom falling and fracturing a hip and being back in her wheelchair, and spending a lot of time working with and learning Sony Vegas Movie Studio video editing software I’m still just one step away from taking a job as a forest ranger somewhere, hopefully with a horse.

So after a few edits and Youtube uploads (see my Caddy’s on the Beach video) I’m happier now than in a long, long time since my frustration with Nero’s video editing software knew no bounds. Sony Vegas even permits me to upload video’s longer than 15 minutes (with a warning) which is perfect since Google/Youtube granted me longer video status a while back.

As a “don’t take life so seriously” move I’m also doing an amateur series of exercise and martial arts Youtube videos and articles on my personal blog for the casual get in kinda-sorta awesome shape without competing with anyone but yourself.

Search engine optimization really deals with the question of how do you deal with strangers. Strangers who Google whatever they Google to find you have to find optimized pages, but what and how optimized? What does optimized mean to you if it’s not making you money?

Well that’s just it. If it’s not answering customers’ needs then it’s not optimized right. If you have a shop you know that everyone who comes in the door year after year is not the same so you’e learned to ask questions. You’ve gotta do the same on the web. Ask, listen and respond. Watch where they go, see where they seem to be having difficulty and and then mork to make it easier for the next time.

Keeping improving a web visitor’s quality experience means knowing what they want and why they’re there on your site by asking for feedback and by tracking their movements on and in your site, and tracking them from wherever they’ve come from to see how they react differently when coming from different referral points on the web (Google searches vs a link in DMOZ for example). If you can do that then you can optimize content differently in each area to satisfy every segment of visitor.

So it’s not mere keywords and return page position we’re talking about, but true optimization that will take your site to the competitive forefront of your market niche, keep you there and gain you the strong advantage that you need.

Live blogged from my Droid.

zOMG! TWO weeks Since My Last SEO Post!? is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

Quite often I get calls from both existing and prospective clients who would like to build a web site all by themselves without having to pay for instruction or advice. I understand the problem and the frustration since eleven years ago I was in the same position myself. I was working as a network administrator for the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in my home town of Manhattan when my partner asked me to help him find some software to quickly build web pages. He had downloaded about 20 programs and I tried out a   dozen and so did he. What I found was one program that was heads above the rest in ease of use, flexibility, potential to – very important! – to grow in and do just about anything required – and finally – inexpensive AND (with just a few hacks) portable! That’s right – take it with you on a thumb drive along with the web sites and work on it anywhere IF you have to! Here’s my video. Take a look at what I found:

Is it the ONLY software I use to build web sites? By all means no, in total I use about probably about 40 different programs and online services but that’s because I’m a professional, and believe in the right tool for the right job. But if you want to know which is my “Swiss Army Knife” of web page making software, Web Page Maker will always be one of my favorites. So, without further ado, enjoy the “How to Build Your Own Web Site” video.

How to Build Your Own Web Site is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

I was doing a bit of reading yesterday and today from Content Rich, a book by Jon Wuebben, and early on he’s got a formula for determining whether a site has enough meaningful content or not.  Jon’s argument essentially is that there are (or were at the time he wrote his book back around 2007, anyway) “seven types of content”. I prefer to see these as content platforms or delivery methods, and each one has it’s own very specific sets of rules to make each work.

The seven are:

• Site
• Videos / Podcasts
• Email
• Newsletters
• Blogs
• Articles
• Press Releases

I’ll break down these experiences one by one in order to give you what I know. First of all, every single one needs to be copywritten to sell and optimized to be found – including the video and podcasts believe it or not because transcripts will inevitably be made, especially if the videos are to be featured on your own site.

Wuebben says that there are four types of sites: E-Commerce, Blog/Social Media, Brochure and Lead Generation, and he ranks the importance of the above seven (except for on Blog/Social Media sites where he leaves off the importance of a site, articles and press releases entirely) differently for each of the four types of sites. So accepting these four types of sites as covering the majority of sites out there then meaningful, informative and readable content is needed, and to keep people coming back, frequent updates will be required. By frequent I mean a few times a week and possibly every day. Google and site visitors like content, they like fresh content, and they like good content.

Video vs Podcast – Podcasts are definitely easier to do. You don’t have to worry about your hair, your teeth, your tie, your anything – and you can keep some notes handy to help you move smoothly from point to point and for intricate details. Matt Cutts, Google’s Chief Web Spam Engineer says to sign up for an account at HotorNot.com and if you score under a 5 to do Podcasts, over 5 do Videos. I don’t recommend signing up there though (I did) because you’ll be getting emails from them forever and it’s very hard to unsubscribe. Video is a whole ‘nother beast though. You can do straight camera phone videos in one take uploaded directly to YouTube,FaceBook and Twitter or you can invest in a fast video editing computer, buy video editing software like Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11.0 or Final Cut (The Vegas Movie Studio is fine – whatever you do stay AWAY from Nero Vision video editing software: it is a nightmare with one issue after the other and no matter what you do your YouTube videos will be fuzzy no matter how High Definition you shoot your crystal clear videos).

I went the Nero Vision route at first but have since abandoned that and am using Vegas Movie Studio now. Other video concerns if you want to go more ‘pro’ will be adjustable illumination lighting / spotlights, special raised platform for your smooth moving video tripod (for shooting above crowds – this also is NOT a standard camera tripod – it has to be a video tripod otherwise your movements will be choppy and ruin your scenes). Plenty of microphones!! Six people outside talking and walking in a breeze or a wind are going to be impossible to video without lots of mics and all the channels.

Don’t let me scare you away from video though. Gary Vaynerchuck has done a spectacular job of doing almost a video a day for years and hosting them on Viddler using a fairly simple setup and camera system done almost entirely from behind a desk he tastes and rates various wines. Great videos, great book (CRUSH IT!) and the concept (successful video blogging) is transferable to other types of businesses.

Vaynerchuck doesn’t do any zooming, panning, or anything else – just aim, shoot and talk. BUT he’s got CONTENT in his videos! He’s able to grab and compare 3 different bottles of wine a day from his business’ inventory to do it, and he knows a good deal about his subject and is able to play with wine tasting jargon in such a way as to make his shows unique and quite fun. Rather than say a Burgundy is a bit earthy with a hint of muskiness, he might choose a phrase like “it tastes like an old sock” instead. Fun and irreverent at times, but accurately giving a much needed review to direct wine drinkers toward what’s best.

Email – here’s one that always astounds me. So many people simply don’t send out emails to market, or simply don’t know the rules of how it’s done. One company I know purchased the list of local Chamber Members and proceeded to send out sales pitches to everyone in the chamber on a regular basis. Nobody had opted in (I know I didn’t) and I tolerated them for a few years until they finally stopped. Another business much more successful provides free monthly seminars and gathers email addresses that way. Each month’s speaker is different and so the emails are always at LEAST informative in that the upcoming guest speaker may be someone interesting worth coming to listen to. Coffee and cookies and the whole night is a win. The services provided by the “GREEN” company are something you always want to keep in mind, so it works.

Email marketing ties right in to newsletter marketing though. Actually the email announces the newsletter (here the two often become confused) which can be in an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Word (or other installed on many people’s computer document format) etc. There is an entire science to e-Newsletters though, and rules that work together to form a concept.

Send the email with some of the content of the newsletter itself and maybe a few coupons – and put a LINK to your web site where the full newsletter resides (without the coupons!). So the time sensitive value of the newsletter is in the 10% off coupons and the information plus the link to more information is a bonus for both the recipient and your site which now has added content for the search engines to crawl!

Now we come to the Blog. The blog is going to be what gives your customers the means to ask questions, interact with your story, interact with others on the blog who have left comments on your story, and to see all of the new and interesting things about your industry that they’re interested in without having to see a bunch of products listed on the pages. You can link to the product pages if they help define the cure for the customers problem, but you don’t need to have shopping cart buttons and product photos in that area.

Article sites – Finally we get to “Article Release Websites” – Pretty much dead from an SEO value point of view. What’s much better now (Jon Wuebben wrote this book in 2007 I think) is Guest Blogging. Write your article on other people’s blogs as a guest author, and have them do the same on yours if their a good fit. Another writer, Jim Cockrum (Free Marketing 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business Online & Off) suggests Googling blogs in your type of industry and approaching the littler fish first on page 3 or 4 to Guest Blog, and as you exchange guest Blog posts with them AND interview them for your blog you’ll eventually rise and emerge as a sort of an expert yourself, and then gradually move up to interview and Guest Blog on bigger, better blogs. Or something like that.

Press Releases: Here’s one of my all time favorites!

If you’ve been running any sort of a blog long enough you’ll know that sometimes a story catches your eye which is so dead on with what you’re talking about that you have to link to it because it’s illustrative of what you’re saying. Well, qute often press releases are how those stories got there. What YOU Link to might not be what everyone else links to, but multiply YOUR link by another 10, 50 or 500 people per day on the days the release is most actively viewed and you’ve got incoming, permanent, organic links. You’ve also got increased relevant pre-qualified interested traffic that might just want to buy from your site, sign up for your e-newsletter emails, call for quotes or consultations or perform whatever other call to action there is on your site.

Wuebben and I agree though that no matter what kind of a site you have, more different kinds of content CANNOT hurt IF the content is good – and that’s the key to success for your Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization campaign.

Content Rich is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO

WORKING JOE SEO

The Boutique SEO business owner (which includes all of the solo artist independent Search Engine Optimizers working on the web and many of the small SEO businesses employing only one or two associates from time to time) IS NOT the gentleman or lady social media all day Tweeter or Facebook marketing “brand” personality you’ve learned to love. The Boutique Sized SEO Business is run by a manager who’s multitasking through multiple windows in various web site optimization project schedules.

Your web site is underperforming and your site needs:

• on site and on page optimization
• off site back link development
• brand recognition via regularly scheduled press releases
• on-site news announcements
• an email newsletter signup
• an email marketing campaign
• to be plugged into social media in more than one place
• to have marketing videos (over 20 of them! they can be short, but you need a bunch),
• marketing copywriting done to sell your products to people who do visit your site
• to have tracking in place and someone who will handle analyzing your site
• better conversions.

Whew! Did I mention this isn’t all?? Building the site and expanding it – updating it and creating new content to keep it growing so it’s always got something fresh for readers to come back to – it’s what makes a site work.

That said – you can easily see how anyone serious who is working alone or with one or two helpers even on one single client’s site has got precious little time for (gaak!!) things like writing an article like this one for posting on Facebook or Twitter, let alone hanging out and posting tons of links to tons of such articles every day all day long. A little investigation by a savvy webmaster reveals that the Tweet and post to Facebook all day socialites employ fairly decent sized full and part time staffs, often numbering in the double digits.

There are two types of Search Engine Optimization: Either you go with the bigger “We Do It All” highly visible SEO companies and you pay a lot (and over time this gets costly because they are usually managing it full time because you are left out of the loop unless you also ask that they teach you), or you put in the sweat equity under the SEO you hire who will direct you on how to perform your part of the ongoing work.

Which type of SEO client are you?

1) If You Can’t Take Direction, if You Procrastinate, if You Can’t Stick to a Schedule, Are Too Busy, or Lack Too Many Computer Skills:

I recommend that you take a hard close realistic look at yourself. In my experience over the past several years working with clients who need search engine optimization to make their business web sites attract more visitors and convert more visitors into customers the majority need to have the work done for them by someone else start to finish if they expect real lasting results and they should probably be prepared to pay out about $5000 or $6000 over a period of a few months for a small site of about 100 pages, and $500 plus per month thereafter for four or five hours of work per month with analytics and course corrections not including the creation, optimization and promotion of fresh content or any social media work. This is standard pricing based on time, effort and expertise.

Below is a sample Gantt Chart (linked to the article explaining in detail what this is) displayed to show that many tasks are being carried out simultaneously on any real SEO/Web Site Marketing project. Thus tasks which would normally be assigned to you or your staff if NOT finished on time would hold up the rest of the job. For example in the top half of the diagram below “WBS 1 Summary Element 1″  WBS 1.1 Activity A cannot be started until WBS 1.2 Activity B is also started – so if your SEO assigns you Activity B and you don’t start on time you (or your company employee[s] assigned the task) are holding up the job which delays the SEOs scheduled jobs in queue elsewhere and losing him money – which raises the cost of  your search engine optimization work. Similarly if you begin WBS 1.2 Activity B on time but do not complete the activity within an agreed to time limit you (or your staff) are delaying the start of WBS 1.3 Activity C which is a Finish to Start activity. Similarly, the 2nd half of the chart “WBS 2 Summary Element 2″ contains a number of activities which may need to be carried out by some 3rd part subcontractor who would need to complete all activities by the end of “WBS 1 Summary Element 1″ (top of chart around week 12) for the full concerted benefits of the SEO project to generate leads.

2) If You Have Motivated Intelligent Employees With an Extra Hour or Two a Day to Help Build Your Web Business:

If those employees (or yourself) are able to take direction, ask questions, and learn at a fast pace you’re on your way to growing your site into a never ending, always expanding, customer attracting and sales making branded web site where YOU get to play the Social Media Butterfly while your staff stays in the trenches providing ongoing quality support building the reputation of your products and services.

IF you and your employees can be counted on to stay on track, take direction, learn at a rapid pace and complete their part of the work on a regularly scheduled basis the job should take about 70% of the time and save about 25% of the initial fee – with the monthly analytics being performed by the trained employees – and very possibly with these same employees also doing the new content creation, uploading, new page / category creation and promotion as well for nothing since you’re paying them already.

What Kind of SEO Service Does Your Web Site Need? is a post from: NYC Small Business SEO