SEO Mentor

With the influx of new Web 2.0 sites online there is a growing concern with businesses both online and offline and how to benefit from Social Networking and Media sites that are currently rocking the online world.

The president of the company I used to work for asked me the following,

“How can Social Media help my company and why should I waste time with it.”

I went through a couple examples of how social marketing would help his business grow and showed him a couple of sites that I thought he should check out like Facebook.com, Squidoo.com, Twitter.com, and Stumbleupon.com just to name a few. Once I said ‘Facebook’ his eyes lit up and he said how fun he has had on Facebook and how he has come across old friends that he hasn’t talked to for years. I then saw a light go on in his head realizing the power of Social Media and Social Networking sites.

A recent article called “Why is Social Media So Hard For Businesses?” by Mark Collier of SearchEngineGuide.com stated:

“More businesses than ever are exploring the possibility of using social media tools and sites to help grow their business. But many of these efforts aren’t very effective, and I think that is due to many businesses simply misunderstanding what social media is, and why it’s so important.

First, what exactly IS social media? Asking 10 people might result in 10 different answers, but for simplicity sake, lets say that social media is a group of tools and sites that let you easily create and share content online. Blogs, social networks, and podcasts are the common forms of social media that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with.

The problem that I think many businesses have, is how they view social media. I believe many businesses (of all sizes) see social media sites and tools as new channels to publish content into. In order words, they view social media as being marketing channels.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Notice in the above definition of social media, I said that these sites and tools are ways to create and share content. Why use the word ’share’ instead of ‘publish’ or ‘distribute’?”

I totally agree with Mark and believe that not only businesses but in general people are misunderstanding the purpose of these social media sites that are now getting more pageviews than even the major search engines. Think of a search engine as a quick search for something and then leave. With these social media sites people are not only viewing more pages on the sites but they are also staying on these sites up to 5 times longer than they stay in the search engines, meaning you as a business owner now have five times as long to catch your viewers attention. THIS IS POWERFUL!!!

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Social Media Optimization (SMO) is relatively a new concept in online marketing, even though it has been there in our society for quite some time now. People like hanging out with like-minded people in a closely-knit group, and a similar strategy is employed when it comes to the online world.

Even a few years back, webmasters used different SEO techniques holding high ranks in search engines, which would ensure greater visibility for the surfing audience, and thus lead to monetary gains. With Social Media Optimization, one can reach out to many more individuals across the globe both as an individual, as well as an employee on behalf of his company.

Facebook.com, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, Twitter and a few other social networking websites enable us to promote and market our business to innumerable individuals, who are members of the websites and social communities mentioned above. These websites thus help organizations to cater to the diverse demands of the public on a large scale.

These websites also encourage professional and cultural exchange, which enable learning individuals to pick up valuable tips from experts in their respective fields. Not only do people with similar interests get to flock together, they can also access easy solutions to their problems by posting them for the experts to answer.

Social Media Optimization also helps organizations and individuals to reach out to the global market with their products and services. The business owners also benefit largely by developing their client base on a reference basis. Not only does it allow a beneficiary give-and-take policy to thrive, but also helps in developing personal relations.

With this kind of an evolution taking place, the world is now just a click away for individuals. The biggest attraction of SMO is perhaps the fact that it allows individuals and organization to venture out on projects with little or no capital expenditure at all.

Most people do business with people they know and trust. So, the best way to get more business is to meet more people and the best and easiest way to meet more people is to use the great new social networking sites. These sites empower you to easily create a page all about your business for free!

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So if you haven’t heard our dear friend Dave Harry aka TheGypsy of Huomah.com has broke his arm. With this terrible news his blog posts go on with the help of Steven Bradley aka VanGogh & David Snyder!

Just wanted to give everyone a quick look at Steven Bradley’s guest post about Social Media Marketing called “The Indirect Value of Social Media Marketing” here were some of the questions about Social Media Marketing that have been asked due to a couple posts by TheGypsy:

1. How to plan a program ( with a real-world example)
2. How to time manage said program
3. How to measure and manage costs
4. How to measure it (KPI)
5. How to determine ROI (return on investment)

Steven continues the discussion focusing on these questions above. He writes, “Focusing on your ROI efficiency and your rate of benefit is a better approach to me and a better way to understand the value social media delivers. To me it’s more that each social interaction potentially leads to your next opportunity. It’s not always possible though, to know where that next opportunity will appear and which or how many of your interactions led to it.”

Read more at his guest post at TheGypsy’s SEO Blog.

So I was doing some research on Facebook.com for some clients that I mentor for Social Marketing. Through my research I found the following articles below that helped me understand a little better what Facebook.com is really all about:

Facebook - Wikipedia

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while still a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students but was expanded to the Ivy League. The website has more than 69 million active users worldwide. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007.

Facebook - The Complete Biography

Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user …

Find Cheap Gas on Facebook

Then you should try the cheap gas application on facebook. The app simply takes your Zip Code that you have registered and automatically shows you the locations & prices for the cheapest gas. It breaks these down by regular unleaded and …

Facebook in Reality

To give you a sense of how ridiculous some aspects of Facebook are, idiotsofants.com have produced a video called Facebook in Reality. It is currently running at 460000 views and comes up first when you type Facebook into YouTube. …

Using Facebook for business (part 2): making it sustainable

If we’re not careful, we can end up with blogs that never have posts added, or Facebook pages that are little more than a few fan photos. This is why I spent a lot of time evaluating Facebook before getting our company into it. …

So if you were ever wanting to learn a little bit more about Facebook.com then I hope this quick post and resources helped.

So I am finally getting done with the design of my blog here at YourSEOMentor.com and am almost happy with the layout and design. I am so sorry I know that design doesn’t matter and content does but I guess I am a perfectionist when it comes to all this stuff. Any ways I just wanted to write and let everyone that ever reads this blog know what I will be writing about and why you should continue reading it.

First of all if you are beginner, guru, professional, or whatever you are you should become a reader of YourSEOMentor.com. Here is why:

Why Not!!!

No, I do not consider my self a guru or professional I simply consider myself a Teacher and Mentor of SEO and Social Marketing. I have had much success in the last 4 years and would like to share that success with everyone that is willing to accept my point of view (Which won’t always be right). I say this because I can tell you right now that I will be getting people commenting on my posts that will disagree with me which is fine. I know the SEO industry all to well and I know there will be people that consider themselves know it alls and will try and tell me that I don’t know what I am talking about. But it all comes down to this I DON’T CARE what they think. I know what works and what doesn’t work cause I do this for a living all day every day. Does this mean I know everything, of course not and I would never dream of telling you all that I do know everything.

So there it is somewhat of a disclaimer for all those that read this blog. Will I give you some great content? Yes! Will I help you with your SEO and Social Marketing online journey? Yes! Will I make mistakes? Yes! But you can know this I am here to help and mentor those that want to Learn SEO and Social Marketing. I will give you access to great tools, techniques, to help you get better rankings in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I will be writing about what others in the industry is saying, and any news that I think is worth talking about.

Here is a list of my Categories that I will be talking about (this is the list as of February 6, 2008):

• SEO
• SEO Tools
• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Link Building
• Keyword Research
• SEM
• Social Marketing
• Social Bookmarking
• Web 2.0
• Web Design & Usability

So there it is all laid out for you to decide, “Is this blog really worth following?” Well I hope it is and I will do my best to give you the content you want. So simply click on the Get SEO Advice under that cartoon image of me and ask me anything and everything and I will try and help answer all you SEO and Social Marketing questions to the best of my ability.

See how I got all the top 10 listings in
Google for the keyword “SEO Mentor”
absolutley
unbelievable.

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So you may be asking how did I do this. I will tell you it isn’t as hard as you think or as people say it is. I have used my SEO Skills and Social Media Optimization skills and put them together to equal huge success.

As an SEO Mentor not only do I give people the steps of learning SEO, I am also starting as a Social Mentor where I help people learn Social Marketing to drive insane traffic to there websites. By using the power of the top Social Networking, Media, and Bookmarking sites I teach how to leverage these sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Hubpages, and many more.

To learn more visit Social Marketing Live.