It is extremely important to choose a CMS that fits your online business website’s long-term goals. One of those important goals is to make sure your CMS has a few important search engine optimization and marketing capabilities. Simply put—your content management system should not reduce the search engine marketing and website optimization rankings you currently have—they should increase your website business’ SEM.

Although content management systems are extremely popular in website construction right this minute, they currently do not offer the same level of control as coding HTML on a page-by-page basis. When you handcode HTML, you have more opportunity to tag everything, which just leads to better SEO statistics. CMS websites are essentially locked in the web content sandbox of modules that are pre-created into “blocks” and dropped in place as needed.

A search engine marketer’s job is to provide professional, crisp and optimized web content for an online business. This should translate to your email correspondance, especially when it concerns issues involving your website business, or your workplace. Here are a few reasons when you should not respond–at least, not right away.

1) If you are angry–No matter what the other person writes, it is not in your professional interests to respond when you are angered. It is bad SEM and even worse manners. When your words of anger are recorded in print, they remain long after your feelings have changed. This could make you look extremely childish.

2) If you are distracted–Unless it’s a one-line email that requires a one-line answer, it is never in your best interest to quickly dash off a response to an email when you are distracted by being in a rush, stressed, on a deadline or dealing with some other issue. You may not get the point right away, and you may have a better response than just shooting from the hip. Ultimately, this will help you, your SEO and your online business look like you have your stuff together.

3) If you are tired–Tired can’t be helped quite as easily as the other two, given the fast-paced lives of most people, but if you can avoid responding to emails when you are too tired to consider the implications, then you will be better served.

Despite your best intentions, though, your web content may get speckled with a few punctuation errors that can change the tone of your message (or just make your online business look silly). While web design is important for the functionality, if it’s too annoying to read, your bounce rates are not going to look pretty. To keep you honest about your website business’ brand management, here are a few common punctuation errors to look out for with your website’s content.

1) !!!!!!!!!–Nothing is so exciting that it requires multiple exclamation points. In fact, your website may be better served without having any exclamation points in the web content. It’s the difference between sounding like an overexcited teenager, and like a serious SEO online business.

2) Apostrophes.–The difference between it’s and its is fairly important. One mean’s “it is” and the other is a possessive. For example– “It’s a lovely day.” v. “Its a lovely day.” The first is correct, because it says “It is a lovely day.”

3) Semicolons–The rule of thumb is, if you don’t know how to use these—don’t. Nobody’s impressed by a semicolon so don’t risk your SEO or the quality of your web content by trying to get fancy for no reason. If your heart is set on a semicolon, however, please consult a grammar guide.

4) Ellipses–These are the “…” that are used to shorten a long sentence so you can get to the point sooner, by glossing over some fine, non-crucial details. You cannot, ever, use ellipses to change a sentence, especially a quote. Generally speaking, for SEM, it might not be necessary to use these, unless there is some definite style purpose.

We recommend adding a second monitor to your workspace and “parking” things like your social media channels, aggregate tools, schedulers and other attention stealers on this monitor, while you use your main space to get things done. it isn’t too much of a challenge to link the two monitors and have one mouse travel across both screens, but if you prefer a larger amount of separation, just hook up two separate systems on your desk. (This may come in handy from a web design perspective if one of your systems is a PC and the other a Mac, but otherwise, it might be a little extraneous.)

Generally speaking, having one “place” where you social media is housed can streamline your process, not just in terms of time, but in terms of how you plan a media campaign. It will also let you know if you are dealing with social media overflow, because it will be a separate task that you have to deal with, and possibly encourage you to re-evaluate how necessary a particular channel is to the success of your online business’ brand awareness.

Managingyour social media channels, and the message each one is conveying about your company is an important part of the search engine marketing and brand awareness process. If you have one diluted message that you push out across all of your channels, you are missing an opportunity to create a network in the “language” of the channel. You are also risking having your online business come off as sounding like a generic spambot.

Once you’ve created a list of the channels you are currently using to address your target audience, go through each channel and list the value of each of them for your everyday life. Is it something that you’re using to enhance your website business’ message, or is it really just something you are using for your own entertainment. Identifying the value of the channel should be something you’re doing in terms of the amount of time spent, and the kind of response you are getting from it.

After you’ve identified the value of a channel, then you may decide to ditch some of them, but if not, then you should examine the channel closely to see what ways you can cut down the amount of work you are doing. Whether it’s by using schedulers to cross post, or working with email updates, try and cut down the amount of time you spend working in these mediums so you can figure out how to grow your target audiences better with quality content.

While social media can help increase the popularity of a website business, most search engine marketing experts should realize that it is hard to pinpoint the ROI of what social media can actually contribute to the bottom line. As a result, any effort spent on social media should be as cost-effective as possible, and take up the least amount of an SEO’s time. So, when the latest, greatest, and neatest new media channel comes out, the first two questions you need to ask yourself are, “Why is this important?” and “Do I really have the time for this?”

There are a few gold standards every online business should be participating, at least as of November 2011. Those are the big, recognized players like Facebook, Twitter and now, LinkedIn. Having some kind of social media effort to increase the optimization and brand awareness of your website business is pretty much par for the course at this point. If you have any extra channels past these few, then you may need to take the first step to managing social media overflow, and make a list of everything you’re using. Stay tuned for the next post on managing social media overflow for your online business.

Recently, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sat down with CNN to talk about his top social media professional website, and give some surprising statistics about how this company is being used by online businesses, recruiters and professionals to enhance their brand reputation.

Search engine marketing professionals interested in growing their online business presence in an international setting should tap the potential of LinkedIn, first. Currently, the site is adding an average of one new user per second, according to the CEO, and about half of all new accounts are created overseas. Of all the regions that are growing on LinkedIn’s 200-country base, China and Brazil are the fastest growing.

As of November 2011, LinkedIn has approximately 85-million users.

From a website optimization and networking perspective, any SEM or recruiter looking to build up his/her online business and brand reputation has a potential 85M-person audience of professionals to connect with. Because of LinkedIn’s analytics, you can narrow that search down to professionals in your niche industry and connect with them.

The benefit of this, of course, is to make networks, build relationships and share best practices with people who know the work you are doing. It will also help you find those future employees, too.

These last two mistakes we’ll mention have less to do with your social media interactions, and more to do with how your SEMs are running the shop when it comes your online business’ media. These mistakes? Poor metrics and planning.

Facebook has expanded its range when it comes to the type of information you can find out about your page. In the Facebook “Insights” you can see everything from how many people are discussing your page, to what city has the highest number of readers. Why, then, would you post a vanity metric like, “We gained 5 followers this week! Woohoo!” It’s nice to know, but it doesn’t mean much if they “Like” the page, and then ignore it. Post the valuable numbers that lend weight to the success of your social media interactions on Facebook, or eventually get called to the carpet for giving bogus information.

Poor planning is another monster the SEM should have defeated when the page went live. Somewhere on your page should be a set of house rules that determine how you are going to treat your social media fans. If there are no rules, you have no basis to act, or react to a hostile situation, and this could be very detrimental, not just to your Facebook page, but to your website business’ brand reputation. Get some rules, tuck them into the “info” section, and have a precedence set, so your fans know the boundaries they cannot cross.

Two ways to turn off fans to your brand and website business are simple social media etiquette practices. The first is to try and avoid deleting comments from your fans. Engagement is a vital part of the social media experience, and if you delete comments (inflammatory ones, especially) without trying to communicate with the fan first, then you are missing out on a chance to show your company’s desire to connect with the audience, as well as the chance to make an irate customer feel a bit better. Also, if you keep doing this, your fans will notice, and then they will leave.

The second thing you can do to drive off potential fans is to turn off the comments section on your page. The whole point of a Facebook page is to engage the community of your website business’ social media platform, and to increase the awareness of your brand and the “coolness” of its employees. Turning off the ability for your fans to have discussions inhibits that growth, and turns your social media into a soapbox where you brag about what you’re doing without listening or looking for feedback. It’s pretty rude to have a one-sided conversation, by society’s standards, so don’t do it with your social media.

In this post, we’ll discuss the difference between Twitter and Facebook, and the easily-abused power of scheduling tools.

Facebook and Twitter have different audiences and styles of communication. While you can post, reply and re-Tweet numerous times in the large flow of conversation on Twitter, if you tried that on the Facebook style of social media communication (which are a contained conversation separated by posts), there is a strong possibility you will get your page un-friended, or blocked by turned-off fans. The type of post matters, too. Hashtags, and truncated sentences work for Twitter, but Facebook…not so much. Approach your audiences in the correct style, and you can be sure to gain a loyal following.

While you’re building your website business’ social media and online presence, you will eventually want to check out, or possibly use, a social media scheduling tool to assist you. Please keep the aforementioned point of audiences in mind, and be wary of your scheduling times, too. While some people may enjoy seeing one hundred posts from your page, most will gloss over them if they aren’t personalized, or come around too frequently. Scheduling tools do allow a measure of freedom for the SEM in charge, especially  in controlling the time of the posts, so take advantage of that option, too.