Bang for Your Buck on Web 2.0 Sites
Hard to say whether this is an intermediate or beginner topic. Anyone with a website should already know this, but I see so many people, hell bent on promotion, that don’t have a clue about keywords or know to explore all available areas to leave their url.
So, Quickly, Here’s the Lesson on Keywords
The keywords you choose to target, choose to use in your content, headings, etc. are not of your choosing. Neither are they cross-site specific.
Here’s an example of what I mean…
In 1998 I had a client who gave training presentations as a Health Care Knowledge Management professional. He wanted to be number 1 for the search term “Knowledge Management Health Care Consultant”. I might add he was a forward thinker 10 years ago, but ‘back in the day’ no one was searching for that particular search string. Therefore being #1 in Google netted him zero speaking engagements, zero traffic, and zero recognition.
The lesson here? Do some keyword research to find what words, related to your product or service, people are actually typing into the search engines!
Flash to Present Day…Tags
Today you not only want to watch what keywords people are using in Google searches, but you also need to pay attention to ‘tags’ used on social networking and bookmarking sites. Tags are one of the key factors in designing your social marketing strategy.
Tags are similar to keywords, but often with shorter search strings. Tags to target on one social site may be completely different on another. You’ll want to spend 5 minutes or so on each social site you target in your strategy to determine which are of the most benefit.
For instance, in the HubPages tagging lesson, you may decide that your camera content is best tagged with the tag “digital+photography”, yet on FotoLog you may find that “canon” is a better option. Your choices will be based on PR (page rank) of the tag page as well as popularity.
Tip: Remember that although our intention is to build traffic to your website via Web 2.0 sites, you will also want some ’search engine love’ for your efforts, so weave your tags into your content with your (search engine selected) keywords. Write your content for both.
Aside from Keywords and Tags
Keywords, tags and a few links to your content aren’t the end of promotion efforts on social-based Web 2.0 sites.
You’ll also want to consider:
- Position Yourself As An Expert by creating a quick profile with a photo, a short biography, and a link to your home page. (In some markets you might want to assume an identity with a model head shot and/or pen name.)
- Add Your Feed. Some sites allow you to add your RSS feed (I love these sites which are the premise of my ebook last year titled “Why Your Social Marketing Results Suck…”) Look for this option on any site you target and use it to it’s full potential. You can add the feed from your own domain if you blog or from any other free blog you post content to.
- Ping Their Feed. Find that site’s RSS feed for your content and ‘ping’ the services to notify RSS aggregators around the world. (Start by using the services at Pingomatic.com and as your experience grows, learn how to announce RSS feeds via software. See: Mastering Marketing through FriendFeed: Import Site to keep it easy right now but when you’re ready to do more with FriendFeed, read all the posts here on the topic.)
