The search engine optimization (SEO) landscape has changed drastically over the past decade.  In the early days of the Internet, search engine optimization was centered on the basic elements of web design, keyword selection, backlinks and placement.  Today, there are numerous additional factors that contribute to search engine algorithms that determine page ranking or what is called web presence.

What has happened?

Firstly, the number of web sites, pages, blog sites and social media content has increased drastically from the days of only having a few million web sites online.  Today – millions of pages of content, blog posts and social media content are published daily on the Internet.  There is an incredible velocity of content generation daily and this will only continue to accelerate. In order for the search engines to provide quality, timely search results for users, they had to develop algorithms to sort through all of the noise.  The complexity of optimizing for organic search rankings has gone through the roof, but the underlying formula for success can be achieved through a combination of strategy, tactics, effort and long-term vision. Of course, software automation added to the process will drastically help (more on this later in the article).

Secondly, competition has escalated during this period of time.  Now,not only do we have an ever increasing volume of content but also many businesses understand the art of search engine strategy and have started spending money on optimizing their web  design and web  content.  Businesses are actively measuring their results with analytics and making changes each month and they understand the value of being found naturally or organically in the search engines.  According to an eMarketer.com survey of senior Marketing and business owners in 2008,a large percentage have added “SEO” to their marketing budget as a separate line item.  Forrester Research surveyed 204 marketing executives in July 2009. Their research unveiled that marketing executives are expected to spend $2.8 billion on SEO services in 2010 with spending to increase year-over-year to $5 billion by 2014.

Thirdly, the entrance of social media to the search engine stage gives us even more we need to focus on. Social media has completely transformed how people share information – in terms of the social anthropology of storytelling (future blog post) and also in terms of how the major search engines have adapted to use social media factors in their search algorithms.  The real-time delivery of information provided by Social media, combined with the upcoming changes to search (See Google Caffeine) mean that social mentions, syndicated press releases, blog posts and even videos can rank higher than business web pages. The most interesting part is that they can rank very quickly, sometimes in minutes.  We are seeing Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook content ranking higher than business web pages!  People are also using social search results as a relevant and convenient traditional search alternative.

What does this mean to your business?

It means that business leaders need to understand the changing landscape of SEO and apply resources accordingly. In-house talent, interactive agencies and/or specialist consultants are all being hired to work manage organic search.  Did I mention before that using a software automation solution would be ideal to remove a lot of the grunt-work from researching, auditing, monitoring and improving web sites? 

What other SEO trends should business owners be aware of?

Major search engines are developing relationships with social media web sites. In the summer of 2009 we saw that both Google and Bing developed closer to ties with both Facebook and Twitter.  Bing (MSN/Live) and Yahoo! recently announced a deal that they would combine their search results and that merger would result in an approximate 28% search market share with Google taking the bulk of the remaining 70%. Google and Binghoo!  (Yahoo! & Bing) are providing more real time data in their search results.  Real time content is coming from streams like social media, press releases and blog posts. As always, a large portion of Page ranking is being determined by popularity, authority and relevance of the backlinks to a piece of content (blog post, web page, etc).  These links traditionally were relatively static between two web sites, however now they are now being created much more dynamically from social media posts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites.

Local Search

Local search has become much more important in recent years as major search engines have made it easier to add local listings and in turn made it easier for users to understand that they have the option of searching locally. Consumers are also searching more often using alternative searches such as maps (via Google Maps).  It is important that businesses understand how local search impacts their search results, especially at the macro level when considering how your results appear in different regions such as Canada versus the United States.

Web Presence

We believe that the largest issues that businesses face today  are needing to understanding the internal and external factors that make up their web presence, how to monitor these factors and then finding the time to effectively manage their web presence effectively over time.  We consider SEO, Social Media, Press Releases and Blogs as web presence optimization.  Look for a future white paper that we will publish on “defining Web Presence Optimization”.  How will your business communication strategy change to adapt to the ever-changing SEO landscape?

Learn more about what search engine algorithms means for your business’ profitability from your local WSI Consultant.

Have you ever seen cyclists racing down wooded trails, up busy streets or leisurely cycling across the countryside of the Great Lakes region? Then you might have caught a glimpse of the WSI Cycling Team. The team, which is co-sponsored by Team Active Cycling and Fitness of Battle Creek, MI and one of our Internet Marketing Consultants, Eric Cook, is in its first year of WSI sponsorship for 2012, althouh the team has been around for five years. They have continued to generate more interest and gain an increasing amount of support from the community.

Have you seen any of our WSI-branded cyclists on the road?

There are roughly 40 individuals on the team and they compete in all types of adrenaline-fuelled cycling events, including road racing, mountain bike racing, triathlons, adventure racing and ultra-distance endurance events.

“Most of the events are local to Michigan and the surrounding Great Lakes region, but some of our team members race around the entire country,” explains Eric Cook, WSI Internet Marketing Consultant that has been involved with the cycling group – as a team manager, racer and most recently a sponsor – for the past five years.

The WSI title sponsor announcement was made at Team Active’s End of Winter Party, where Chris Carmichael (who is best known as the coach that worked with Lance Armstrong) spoke to team members and customers from around the south-west Michigan area about motivation, the cycling lifestyle and achieving your goals.

World famous cycling coach, Chris Carmichael, with WSI Internet Marketing Consultants Erica and Alicia Cook, WSI President Doug Schust and Linda Dinelle of M3-SocialMindz.

Giving back to the community

While all the WSI Cycling Team members share a passion for cycling and racing, a huge part of what they do is focused on giving back to the community. Team members volunteer at local events and regularly organize trips to schools where they teach children about the values of cycling and fitness as well as the importance of being safe on the road.

“Kids can get involved in team sports and cycling from an early age, so it’s important to teach them about bicycle safety, such as wearing a helmet, and discuss how being active can improve their lifestyle and schoolwork,” adds Cook.

The WSI Cycling Team, which all wear branded jerseys, shorts, jackets and “mechanics” shirts, have also helped create a buzz about the business, with many people initiating conversations and becoming more interested in the digital marketing solutions that the global network of consultants are able to offer.

“Our team has a unique jersey design and it’s easy to spot the WSI racers at events. Fellow cyclists and supporters often want to know where we are from and what we do, which has allowed me to strike up conversation with many local business owners,” says Cook.

Combining racing and digital marketing is ideal for someone like Cook. “One thing I love about our company is that it has given me the ability to combine my two passions – digital marketing and cycling – into one activity,” says Cook.

The team’s website, which you can visit at www.WSICycling.com, is where team members can blog and give updates about triathlons, road events and other cycling activities that they participate in. They also use social media, such as Facebook, to keep in touch with one another and plan upcoming events.

While the team’s clothing order for this year has closed, they will be ordering more team kits early next year. If anyone is interested in joining the WSI Cycling Team, please contact Eric Cook directly at eric@poweredbywsi.com.

Why do we need content marketing? Because sales are going down and marketing initiatives like cold calling no longer works, which is why you need more inbound marketing tactics.

What is content marketing? It’s about understanding what information your customers need to know about your products and services. After this, you need to give them relevant content and educational content that persuades them that you are an expert in your field.

Why do you need quality content?

• It develops trust
• Drives traffic to your web traffic
• Educates and informs

The Panda update focused on ensuring that sits that are given high SERP’s are actually relevant. It penalizes a site’s poor quality content, which are usually used to farm back links. The quantity of links isn’t important; it’s all about the quality. You need to write good quality content and you need natural links.

If you aren’t on social media and you don’t have the social share buttons on your website, you’re not giving your content the opportunity to be shared and distributed online.

Content audit

• Analyze your current content efforts
•  Size up the competition
•  Observe the social climate
•  Determine the gaps

What are your social efforts?

• How well are you using social technologies?
• Website
• LinkedIn
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Pinterest

How personas can improve your SEO

• Help find the right keywords for target audience
• Identify target for link building
• Help create the right content

This website can help you determine the user personas for SEO: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/user-personas-for-seo/

A good way to write relevant content is to keep an eye out on the news and relate it to your business. Another thing you can do is follow the thought leaders – find the CEO’s, the people who are breaking news etc.

You should never refer to your “Facebook strategy” or your “LinkedIn strategy” – it’s all a conversation strategy.

Web property strategy

You need to own all your website properties, such as a Facebook fan page, Twitter accounts, a LinkedIn company page and so forth. Your social strategy needs to engage, inform, participate and provide behind the scenes info.

Ask yourself: Do I know what my customers are saying about me through the socialsphere? You can do a keyword search to find out where you are being mentioned, what the sentiment is and who is talking about you.

These should be your goals:

• Listen and learn about our customers: Set up alerts on Google, Twitter, Blog. Create rivers of information.
• Grow community to 5,000: Develop targeted campaigns to encourage sharing of content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Pinterest
• Website integration: Integrate social properties with website properties
• Reach new markets: Grow the LinkedIn group to 250+ members
• Become a resource authority: Build up your website & company’s authority and trust, both on and off-site

Openness & Transparency

Society is moving more towards full transparency as a sign of truth and trust.  That goes for corporations and individuals. You need to be transparent – if you talk a big talk, but people can’t find you online, it becomes risky to do business with you.

When you optimize a website, your home page has to be optimized for your company as a whole, not individual products. When doing keyword research, you need to move away from single keyword phrases like ‘carpet cleaning’ at some point. Do keyword research that includes questions like ‘why’ to get to the top of the funnel. Try Ubersuggest.com to broaden your results.

The content funnel

Awareness

Creating your voice. Increase knowledge, understanding & awareness of your company. E.g:

• Blog Posts
• Social Media Updates
• Infographics
• Press release

Consideration

Make people think about the value proposition of your products & services. E.g:

• EBooks
• White papers
• Webinars
• How to
• Presentations

Decision

Create confidence, purpose & conclusion around your brand. E.g:

• Case studies
• Products
• Brochure
• buy now
• services
• free demo
• loyalty scheme; packages; methodology

There are five things that always exist on a successful landing page:

1)    Headline

2)    Demonstration (if you don’t have pictures or descriptions on what the visitor has to do on the page, they will leave)

3)    Value – there has to be a reason why they should choose you instead of your competitors

4)    Support

5)    Action – tell people what they need to do. There has to be a single call to action on your landing page – if you expect someone to do four different things, they’ll do none

Every time you give someone an excuse to leave your page (like a social sign in), you’re giving them the opportunity to leave and never come back.

You have to think about why the visitor wants to interact with your content. Nobody cares about features – if you’re creating the right emotional feel for a product, you’re going to have higher conversion rates.

Things that can help your landing page:

• Bullets
• Graphics
• Emphasis (italic, bold, underline)
• Images

Many of your customers don’t think about your product in the same way you do, this is why testing is so important. Always try to find out what a potential customer would want to invest in emotionally when creating a landing page.

Test your content

If you’re selling a luxury item, you’re probably going to need to provide more content. If you’re just asking someone for an e-mail address, keep the content short. The important thing is that you test the content to see what works for you. Don’t argue with people about changing the headlines or other content – just change it, test it and use the one that performs the best.

Creating a great landing page: The Process

Phase 1

• Brainstorm content
• Design and write
• Create more content than  you need
• Create control page
• Create variations
• Test

Phase 2

• Analyze your results
• Choose new control
• Revise variations
• Test again

Phase 3

• Headline
• Call to action
• Large images
• Length of content

Your headline needs to take the visitor from “I think this is the right place” to “I know this is the right place”. Once they realize they’ve come to the right place, they have patience.

Images

Sometimes a picture of a woman works really well and sometimes a picture of a man will work. You need to test the images and choose the one that conveys the right emotion for whatever you are selling.

If you use a picture of a person on your landing page, make sure the person faces the action on the page. If they’re looking at you, you start thinking about the person in the image instead of the content on the page.

Buttons

One of the last things you need to be testing is the buttons on the landing page.  Your headline and images are more important.

Ways of expressing value

It’s a requirement that you communicate value. After the website visitor realizes they’re in the right place, you need to make sure they know that what they’re about to buy or sign up for is valuable.

Forms

Don’t create long forms that ask a visitor to give you their name, phone number, e-mail etc. Don’t use the word “submit” on your buttons. People don’t want to “submit”, they want to “buy”.

Content critique

People don’t care about you and your company, they want to know what you can do for them.

The three most important aspects of internet marketing:

• Influence: One thing I always talk about is how influence is changing all the time. You need to find the right people who will mean something to your clients. In the past, if you wanted to influence people you would buy an ad in a newspaper – the internet has changed this.
• Experience: You need to create an amazing experience. How do you deliver such great joy to people that they come to you to give you money?
• Value: Many times, you obsess so much about data that you forget about creating value.

Understanding your website’s challenges

The first question you need to ask yourself about your website is “why are the website visitors here?”. You need to have a good sense of why people are coming to your website and what they want to achieve. Also ask “were you able to complete your task?” and “if not, why not”?

Surveys are also a really great way to grasp the problems that are below the surface. These surveys need to be hyper-targeted and agile. You can use http://www.usertesting.com/ to find out what your website’s biggest problems are. You need to get this type of feedback to find out how you can improve things. Fivesecondtest.com and Conceptfeedback.com will get an online community to give you feedback about your website.

Say no to data puking!

Some digital marketers use the following train of thought when it comes to using data and website analytics: “Let’s just take all this information and puke it out!”, so they basically let someone else go and figure out what to do with it. This strategy never works.

When you give your clients data, it needs to be very focused. There are three things you need on every single report

• Acquisition metrics – what are you doing to get people to your website?
• Behavior metrics – you need to measure what people are doing once they come to your website
• Outcomes – you need to show your client how much money they’re making with their visits

Visit this link for custom PPC reports: http://zqi.me/ATAabo

You need to understand which traffic sources you should be investing in. Look at the entire acquisition portfolio (all the traffic sources) and determine which traffic is good.

Once you’ve got all the data, you need to create quick views, which may give you some surprises (such as that your paid sources are giving you the highest bounce rates).

In the past, marketers needed to shout louder and longer to make themselves heard. With internet marketing, you need to influence people. Our ability to shout at people is diminishing. People are obsessed with getting people to follow them, but what happens after the follow? Or they obsess about “the best times to tweet”.

Some things to measure on social media:

• Conversation Rate: The number of audience comments or replies per post
• Amplification Rate: The number of retweets per tweet, the number of shares per Facebook or Google+ Post and forwards per social contribution
• Applause Rate: Favourites, Likes, positive clicks
• Economic value: You can’t use social media to make a lot of money, you will only make money as a side-effect of what you’re doing on these platforms

Use Truesocialmetrics.com to show your clients exactly how well they are doing and how much they are making from their social media efforts.

If a CEO asks you what your business objectives are, the answer to this question is “Why do we exist? Honestly, why?”. Goals are specific strategies you’ll leverage to accomplish your business objectives. A KPI is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives. Focus on hyper relevant data to add value.

Erik Qualman, founder of Socialnomics

We’re in the midst of one of the biggest shifts we’ve ever seen. We go through shifts all the time, from ecommerce and portals to mobile – and now social media is providing the biggest shift of our times.

Social media levels the playing fields

Digital life is very complex, but those who simplify it, win. Social media is almost more important for small and medium sized businesses because they don’t necessarily have the resources that larger companies have. Social media levels the playing fields between small and large businesses.

A few facts from the social media video that Erik showed during his presentation:

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. In 10 years over 40% of the Fortune 500 will no longer be here
3. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
4. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
5. 1 in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online
6. 1 in 5 divorces are blamed on Facebook
7. Gen Y considers emails passé. Some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
8. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest and 2x the size of the U.S. population

The number one social media mistake that businesses make is doing nothing. They’re not out there learning and failing. They need to go fast and go forward – when it comes to social media, we need to increase our rate of failing. Businesses don’t have a choice about whether or not they’re doing social media because their clients are already using it, the only choice you have is how well you do it.

50% of companies running SuperBowl commercials forget to post their ads on YouTube, which shows that you always need to have a social media plan.

World of mouth on visual steroids

Social media is word of mouth marketing on steroids

Word of mouth has always been the most important type of marketing for businesses, but with social media it’s word of mouth on visual steroids.

People now have the tools to post their experiences with a company on social media and share it with hundreds of thousands of people. If your company offers a great customer service and experience, you can thank social media for spreading the word. If not, you need to improve.

Social media and online reputations

You should never let your reputation run away with you, like what happened with United Airlines when the company broke Canadian musician Dave Corroll’s (from the Sons of Maxwell band) guitar. He created a video called United Breaks Guitars (watch the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo). United Airlines refused to reimburse Dave for his guitar, until he made the video. Over 13 million people have watched this video on YouTube and United Airlines paid him when he posted the video, but they could’ve saved themselves 13 million views if they responded to him immediately. The key thing to remember is: What happens offline also goes online.

Your digital legacy

We all have a digital legacy. Digital Legacy = Footprints + Shadows. Your footprints are blog posts your write or anything you do. Shadows are what other people post about you. Most children under the age of 2 already have a digital legacy thanks to information that gets posted by others about them.

Year in Review

It’s amazing how some of our Internet Consultants have been with WSI for such a long time. One of the reasons I am standing here today is because of the community. Many of our international team of Internet Consultants have been with the company for many years and we’re always in touch, networking and brainstorming together.

Competition is changing and the market is shifting upstream, this is good news because it’s really getting better. Our clients’ needs are also changing and this gives us more opportunities to help them grow their brands.

Our business has continued to grow and the industry continues to mature. We’re in a unique point in our history – this is our point of growth.

WSI

WSI is a Global Digital Marketing Consulting company that deals with Small, Medium and Large Companies. Knowledge, experience, systems, ability to innovate and drive results makes us different. The foundation has been laid and this allows us to become leaders and innovators.

Our vision:

• Become One if not The Leading Global Brand in Digital Marketing. Our international network of Internet Consultants makes this possible.
• Have the most recognised brand
• Be the most heard brand
• Excel in delivery and results
• Be innovative
• Lead by early trend testing
• Become an agile company and not get bogged down in deep rooted funnels

Our brand

We’re a global brand. We’re the brands behind the brands.

Our core offerings include PPC, SEO, Site building and Content. Social, landing pages, display ads, mobile, design and creative solutions are also a huge part of what we do.

WSI has won 29 international web awards over the past few years, we’re really good at building strong sites that convert traffic. The website, the content as well as the marketing all need to be seamlessly integrated with one another. As a digital marketing company, all of our solutions need to work together in order to add value to our clients’ brands.

Welcome to the WSI Global Convention! It’s Day 1 and we’re looking forward to hearing from Doug Schust, Avinash Kaushik and Eric Qualman.

Follow this blog to find out what’s happening and the E & I Convention this year!

When I talk with prospects and clients our conversations usually include standard SEO topics such as keyword phrases, content strategy, competitor analysis, social media, analytics, and the one topic that ‘links’ all these together – backlinking.

That is, incorporating keywords into backlinks, writing press release content with backlinks, out-backlinking the competition, using social media as a backlinking source, and of course measuring backlinks with analytics. Why is backlinking so important to your organic search strategy?

Google’s algorithm places a heavy weighting on the number of websites that are referencing (or linking back to) your website.  These are backlinks or inbound links. Google’s logic is pretty simple: if other sites are referencing your site, then it must be a relevant and trusted site with relevant content.

But it isn’t so simple. The backlinks to your site must be:

• high quality, relevant links freely given based on editorial judgment;

as opposed to:

• low quality, spammy, irrelevant links, links from untrustworthy sources or traded links.

Backlink 101: Structure and Definitions

Here are some basics that will be helpful:

1) What is a backlink?
On this web page – http://business.financialpost.com/2010/12/08/canadas-most-innovative-companies – there’s a backlink to http:www.gshiftlabs.com.

2) What is anchor text?
The anchor text for the backlink is “gShift Labs”. (The text that you actually click on.)

3) What is domain value?

Google places a value on a backlink source. So the source “financialpost.com” would have a higher value than say “thebarrieexaminer.com”.

Now that we know this, we can talk about the do’s and don’ts. Here are some things to think about:

Backlinking for SEO: The Do’s

1.     Be consistent. Google wants to know that you are committed to your backlink strategy and Google’s algorithm can detect if you’re not committed. For example, if you have 59 backlinks today and overnight you have 15,000 (because you bought backlinks from a backlink farm) you will likely be penalized, which will negatively impact your ranking.

Google wants to see that you are adding a consistent number of backlinks to your web presence over the course of a normal time period. For example, 5 to 10 backlinks per week, every week or 50 backlinks per week every week.

2.     Optimize your anchor tags. An anchor tag with the text “Click Here” or “Read More” is pretty useless to your SEO efforts. Instead try to optimize your anchor text with keyword-rich content that matters to you. For example, if one of your top keyword phrases is “orange party dresses” then you’ll want to create anchor text based on this phrase and have it link through to a web page that is also optimized for that phrase.

Note: It might not always be possible to control the anchor text for your backlink.

3.     Unique domains. Google wants to see that you have a strong variety of domains in your backlink inventory. If all your backlinks are coming from one source it is a signal that your website probably isn’t all that relevant.

4.     But, how do I add backlinks? If you feel dumb asking the question you’re not alone. How should you go about building backlinks? It is really about producing content. You can produce content by:

a.      Issuing regular press releases through a syndication service such as PRWeb.com or MarketWire.com.
b.     Blogging on trusted third-party websites with links back to your website (when appropriate).
c.      Getting your website added to relevant industry portals and directories.

Backlinking for SEO: The Don’ts

1.     Don’t buy links unless you really really understand the company that is selling the links to you, the quality of the links and the risks associated with the potential outcome of buying those links. Talk to an expert or get a second opinion before committing to such tactics.

2.     Don’t trust any SEO Professional or Agency that promises a #1 organic ranking. A #1 organic ranking is completely impossible to guarantee because there are so many external variables beyond the control of the SEO Professional. Variables such as Google’s always-changing algorithm and competitors’ websites just to name a couple.

3.     Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO Professional what their backlinking strategy is for your web presence. Or better yet, tell them you want a backlinking strategy outlined, before it is implemented.

Now I’d like to share one really sad SEO backlinking story with you.

The Sad SEO Backlinking Story

J.C. Penney hired a SEO firm to optimize its website for organic search. To make a really long sad story short, Google ultimately penalized J.C. Penney’s rankings after it was determined that the SEO firm hired, implemented backlinking tactics that Google considers “black hat” or unethical. The initial outcome of these unethical backlinking tactics was a #1 rank for a variety of keyword phrases that matter to J.C. Penney.

How did the SEO firm accomplish this? They paid to have thousands of backlinks placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenny.com. (New York Times, Dirty Little Secrets of Search, February 12, 2011.). In a nutshell, “paid-for backlinks”. The worst part is that the client, J.C. Penney, was unaware of the unethical practices the SEO firm was employing to achieve the high organic rankings. Bad SEO firm.

Once it was brought to Google’s attention that the J.C. Penney website was attempting to game Google’s search algorithm, Google began manual actions against JCPenney.com, essentially decreasing their organic rank.

“At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71. At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.” By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.” (New York Times, Dirty Little Secrets of Search, February 12, 2011).

Moral of the Sad SEO Backlinking Story: Keep your SEO ‘white hat’ or you will be penalized by Google and this will negatively affect your business. A strong, effective backlinking strategy is a marathon, not a sprint.

Learn more about developing a custom SEO strategy for your business from your local WSI Consultant.

Just when you thought you had your social media strategy and web presence under control, yet another social networking site is becoming mainstream. Seven months ago it was Google+, now it’s Pinterest and it is gaining momentum in popularity as well as relevance in organic search.

Pinterest is a social photo sharing website that has also been described as an online pin board. Its more than 10 million registered users, over 2 million of whom log in every day, “pin” photos, graphics, and videos into categories they create based on their own personal interests. Pinterest users also share their pins on Facebook and Tweet them.

“Their own interests” may indeed include images that represent your brand. Pinning images is how your visitors, prospects, clients and fans want to visually socialize your organization.

The likes of GE and IBM are using Pinterest, proving that it is relevant to both B2C and B2B.

Here are eight SEO reasons to add Pinterest to your web presence and how to get started.

1. Google

Pinterest content is being crawled and indexed by Google, therefore it will impact your SEO rankings. Think of it as an opportunity to outrank a competitor for a keyword. If you are pinning on behalf of your organization, take the time to optimize Pinterest photo comments with important keyword phrases. If you have control over image file names when originally published, take the time to optimize photo descriptions for keywords as well.

2. Backlinks & Referrals

Every image pinned to a Board has a link back to its original published source. These are valuable backlinks and can provide referral traffic as well. Capitalize on this. Posting your product and service images and videos is a great place to start. However, keep in mind that it’s important to avoid being blatantly self-promotional – remember to provide value to your audience by sharing quality content that is relevant to their interests and worth liking, commenting on, and re-pinning.

3. The Pinterest Search Box

With millions of visitors to Pinterest every day, people are looking for brands via the Pinterest search box. Is your brand available? Does your Pinterest presence represent and reinforce your brand to a prospect who might be searching?

4. Web Presence

Pinterest is yet another web presence point. Simple as that. Just like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, Pinterest has gained enough momentum and significance that excluding it any longer may negatively impact your web presence compared to your competitors.

5. Content

Pinterest is unique because it is the only social networking site focused solely on sharing images. You likely do not have to go far to find an inventory of photos, graphics and videos in your organization. For example, design and architecture firms have projects, real estate agents have listings, product companies have products, services companies such as vacation and leisure have snap shots of places, artists have art, sports-related companies have action shots, non-profits have people and places and event pictures, technology companies have conferences and infographics, and so on.

Get creative and start thinking about how to build your inventory of photos.

6. Social Signals

We know that social signals are factored into Google’s and Bing’s organic search algorithms. Pinterest provides yet another opportunity for your visitors, prospects and customers to generate social signals (Tweets, Likes, Shares, Google +1’s, and now Pins). Social signals indicate to Google that people want to socialize your content with people they have relationships with, which signals that your content is relevant.

7. Competitors

Your competitors are likely using Pinterest already. This is a grand enough reason to get started. But better yet, if they are not, you can take advantage of the situation and start building out your Pinterest presence before they do.

8. Pinterest is not going away in the near future.

In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social networking sites, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week – this number increased to 21.5 million visits for the week ending January 28, 2012. According to Experian’s 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report, Pinterest is now the third most popular social network in the U.S. behind Facebook and Twitter, having surpassed LinkedIn.

And the Pinterest team is serious about their business. Recently they raised an additional $100 million from some noteworthy investors.

Getting Started

Getting started is rather straight-forward:

1. Request an account by going to http://pinterest.com/. If you know someone who already has an account, ask for an invitation.
2. Set up a Pinterest account for your business and reserve your main brand name.
3. Be sure to connect your business account with your Twitter and Facebook accounts so you can share content across the social sites. When you pin an image you can also tweet it and share it.
4. Add the Pinterest social icon to all your corporate web pages and blog pages.
5. Add a Board and get busy pinning!

Pinterest is one of many tools you can use to optimize your internet marketing plan. Get on the right path today by contacting a knowledgeable WSI Internet Consultant to assist with your strategy.