Date: May 3rd, 2011 | Author: Steve Longoria | Tags: Advertising, Automate, Blogging, Entrepreneur, Facebook, Facebook Applications, Fan Page, Free, Marketing, RSS, Social Media, Tech, Word Of Mouth | No Comments »
I’ve been looking into RSS Graffiti to automate yet another mundane task. RSS Graffiti is a free Facebook application that pulls content from whatever RSS feeds you input and it then automatically posts to your Facebook page. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should never log in to your Facebook page again.
It’s still good to make updates on your Facebook page communicating directly with your fans instead of always just posting links. It’s something I need to work on myself, but I know it will only benefit me in the long run as it will help my “fans” and visitors to get to know which really brings us to what we’re all trying to do here… and that is to build relationships. Business and personal.
RSSGraffiti.com explains:
“RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify. You can get any feed written on any wall (Facebook Profiles, Fan Pages, Groups, Events and Application Profile Pages). In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.”
Continue to RSS Graffiti!
Date: April 18th, 2011 | Author: Steve Longoria | Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Stumbleupon, Traffic, Visitors, Word Of Mouth | 1 Comment »
We all want more traffic to our sites, this is a given. We also know that increasing our rank in the search engines (Google especially) will result in more traffic right? Right!
Here’s the problem: We have very little control over how high we rank in the search engines for a given keyword! The algorithms change all the time! Why spend countless hours on achieving a high ranking for one particular keyword, or set of keywords if you could easily lose those rankings tomorrow? I think there are better ways to spend my time that would bring better results, which is why I stopped handling my “search engine marketing” this way a long time ago.
So what is my SEO strategy?
1. I make sure my URL’s are search engine friendly by making sure the title of my post is included in the URL itself. Check out the URL for this post as an example. It is “http://truewebpresence.com/google/search-engine-marketing-simplified”. In order to do this in WordPress you have to go to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure and input /%category%/%postname%/ in the field provided (check out these free wordpress video tutorials for further instruction).
2. I make sure my title tags are search engine friendly. I typically have them arranged this way “(Post Title) > (Blog Name)”. Nothing too crazy. This the URL, Post Title, and Title Tag are all synced up.
After doing basic SEO, I simply focus on publishing the best content I can possibly publish. That’s it.
When you simply focus on publishing quality content your bound to please more human beings, which is way more important than pleasing some computer algorithm. Why? Because human beings are known to share things like wild fire, it’s called word of mouth. This is the direction the Internet is heading with social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon becoming increasingly popular and vital to a websites operations.
You have to remember what business Google is in. They’re in the business of providing relevant, quality content in their search results. So as long as you’re providing that quality, it’s Google’s job to find you, and even if they don’t it’s their loss. You will officially be taking the high road, and you will no longer need to depend on the search engines for traffic, for you appeal to a force far greater… human beings.
It has worked well for me over at my music blog/record store. Every month I get traffic from over 300 different keywords and that continues to grow the more I blog. I’m found under keywords I never even thought to target intentionally. I even rank in the top 3 for the keyword “punk blog” without even trying! You can expect different results depending on which market you’re in.
Obviously the kind of music on my blog is not mainstream, and I could get more traffic by blogging about more mainstream artists but that’s not what I care about on that site. It’s my hobby, and I only care to talk about music I’m passionate about there. Regardless, the strategy I’m applying is still working! So well that I decided to apply the same strategy to TrueWebPresence.com, so be sure to follow us here to see updates on our traffic and such.
It’s important to note that SEM/SEO is not the be-all end-all when it comes to generating targeted traffic. It’s not even my favorite method! Click here to learn about my other methods for generating targeted traffic.
Now ask yourself, if you lost all your search engine traffic tomorrow, how big of an impact would that make on your business/website? If the answer is “a lot”… then maybe you should rethink your business model.
Update 2012: The “Google Search+” update is introduced.
Update: See, even big sites like eHow.com can wake up one morning to find out Google doesn’t love them as much as they thought. In regards to the latest algorithm update by Google called “Panda”, WebProNews Writes:
“According to the SearchMetrics data, eHow.co.uk took a 72,30% hit in visibility. eHow.com took a 53,46% hit. Keep in mind this is UK data, but it has also affected U.S. sites.”
