For those of you living in a cave the past few years, there is an extremely powerful marketing tool that exists today-- social media.  This article serves as a “wake-up call” to those of you who don’t have a social media account, or who may only have one or two of them.  Let’s take a look at a simplified version of a quick-start social media marketing action plan….

1.        Sign up for Facebook!  Yes, I said it, if you don’t have a Facebook page your internet marketing strategy is already obsolete.  These used to be exclusive to college students, but now there are over 300 million users.  EMG can help you with the specifics of registering your business, creating a fan page, etc… Contact us for more info—but first, sign up!!

2.       A little birdie told me you should create a Twitter account.  If any of you are like me, you are annoyed by this concept—but too bad.  Twitter is spreading like wildfire, and it is an integral component of having an effective social media marketing plan.

3.       Visit www.LinkedIn.com and sign up here as well.  Yes, you are going to have to remember more login names and passwords, but trust me it will be worth it.  All of these different social media sites help your rankings in Google, and these will help you get a ton of loyal followers.  LinkedIn is one of the easier social media hurdles to overcome, because it is tailored towards the business professional, you!

4.       Get used to writing blogs, articles, white papers, etc… Eventually, EMG wants to help you create a custom company blog page where you will post all of this content on a daily-to bi-weekly basis.  A custom blog page will fit in well with your social media marketing plan because we can help you add links that allow users to “tweet” your blog, or “share” with facebook friends.  If this doesn’t make any sense… don’t worry, we’ll help you solve the puzzle.

5.       Visit other blogs and participate!  This is important.  You must reach out to other bloggers in your industry, and offer helpful insight and quality responses… every single time you do this, you help your OWN website!  We’ll dive into the specific strategies once we get steps 1 through 4 established correctly and efficiently.

Ok, for some of you, this may seem like a lot of work, but EMG can help!  Contact us today to get more information about how we can create a custom Social Media Marketing Action Plan and help you implement it. 

Until next time,

Happy Tweeting.

This has been a controversial question that many marketers and SEO's have been asking themselves and the experts for a while now, and even more since Google's latest caffeine update.

The answer is YES - Google always has been picky about the types of websites that link to yours.  In a nutshell, only links from quality, "relevant" websites will help your rankings on Google. They, no doubt, need to be from websites that are not spammy, nor link farms, and are somewhat related to yours.  Furthermore, what we're seeing now after the caffeine update is that links from unrelated sites can actually hurt your rankings.

Prior to Google's caffeine update (the 2010 revamp of it's algorithim) having links from spammy and bad quality sites could never HURT your rankings - it just wouldn't HELP them.  Based on our research, and after many discussions with experts in our field, we think that this has changed in the 2010 caffeine update.  It does appear now that links now can actually harm your rankings. Now, there is no way to prove this 100% - but we've done some studies and believe this to be the case.

What does this mean?

1).  You need to WATCH OUT for your competition.  If this theory is true, that means your competitors could sabatage your rankings by having spammy unrelated sites linking back to yours (or even buying links). To be blunt, the SERP's could easily turn into a battlefield where SEO companies could now sabatage, or atleast downgrade the rankings of any website.

2).  You need to do a thorough link analysis of your website and idenfity low quality, spammy links. In the past it helped you - but now it can harm you. Attempt to contact these webmasters to get the low quality links removed, if possible.

3). Quality is definitely more important than Quantity.  In Google's eyes, 10 links from quality, relevant websites will help your rankings more than 100 links from bad quality, irrelevant websites. So focus on quality links, even if they come in smaller numbers. It is worth it in the long-run.