Anything that can connect you or your business to something that is surrounded by a great deal of industry chatter will always be great for your search engine optimization efforts. Viral marketing attempts when done correctly can lead to a great deal of bloggers writing, people chatting and links building. If it is a really good attempt you could get write ups with links from industry leading blogs and websites that might not have made any attempts to write about your business in the past.

Viral marketing is a type of effort that is long lasting and when done right could propel your business name into your industry more than any other effort. If the viral approach is weak it could have a negative impact on your goals so it is important to really outline your viral marketing campaign and hit it with everything you got. Often times a good viral marketing campaign consists of a message that others can really relate to but might have not had the energy or strength to come out and say it themselves. You don’t want to use self promotion techniques in your viral marketing because that sometimes seems tacky and could turn people off resulting in a pour outcome. If you don’t have the budget to do it right wait until you do. The last thing you want to do is set up a shaky camera on a rickety tripod and have the quality of the production take away from your message. Getting the production aspect of it right is vital to the success of your video marketing campaign. If you want to really kick things up have sequels to your viral marketing campaign. You could even launch the first as a “part 1” to let people know there will be more to come. If the video is good you will get people really waiting for “part 2”.

This usually gets people coming back frequently to see what else you have in store. Over time a few viral marketing campaigns could really allow your blog or business to build up a solid source of loyal readers. Viral marketing has a great deal of power and has been known to single handedly allow businesses to go from a slow crawl to a sprint fairly quickly. Remember the first time GoDaddy.com used a provocative female in their ad during the super bowl? That was close to ten years ago and people still talk about it to this day. That is the power of doing the right viral marketing campaign for your business.

Social media marketing should not be looked at any longer as a white elephant. Social media marketing is happening right now and all businesses need to understand the value and importance to incorporate it into their daily search engine marketing routine. You might think it sounds extremely difficult to slide in those efforts now but you might be surprised as to how easy it really is.

Do you currently write in your blog at least once or twice per week? A blog is perfect way for a business to get involved in social media. As you write your blog posts do you do anything with them? If you don’t you could be missing out on some great traffic not to mention additional search engine optimization benefits for your website. Remember that the search engines see almost everything you do to promote your business so taking a robust social approach will help strengthen your websites power over time. By dropping the link to your blog post in your Twitter and Facebook page you open the door to a whole new type of audience and web user.

Does Twitter still scare you? It shouldn’t. All businesses should be using Twitter in some way. I don’t recommend spending your entire day using Twitter but 30 minutes to an hour everyday will help you get some great exposure online. Start by just following your competitor’s followers for now. This is a nice way to give them a tap on the shoulder and just let them know that you are there and that you exist. This way you can really test the waters with slowly incorporating social media into your search engine optimization efforts. Over time as you feel a bit more confident and advanced you can certainly ratchet things up quite a bit. Social media is not something to be scared of any longer. Every search engine marketing campaign requires you to take an approach that assists in targeting your online social audience. Why wouldn’t you want to be visible where your audience is already hanging out? Start by setting up the profiles completely and filling in all necessary information and over time increase the amount of efforts you incorporate from a social level and you will see your web traffic increase tremendously.

When you start to market your business online depending on how much of a saturation point you reach you will slowly start to reach an exhaustion point and the act of thinking outside the box will be extremely important to keep things moving forward for your business. You can only get so far only doing the same efforts over and over and a viral video marketing campaign done the right way could significantly increase the power of your online business.

Here is a great video that I found about viral video by Mark Apsolon:

Viral marketing expert Mark Apsolon holds a YouTube channel where he offers free information and tips on how to promote a viral video the right way. Mark has years of experience promoting videos and knows just how to do it correctly. Putting a catchy video together surrounding your business could lead to massive amounts of targeted traffic landing on your website. As other bloggers and websites start to write about your video you start to create a viral energy spooling around the video and before you know it you have a successful viral marketing campaign that is really helping your search engine optimization efforts in a tremendous way. Mark Apsolon states that short quick bursts of information really getting to the point as quickly as possible is the way to go. Most people start to lose attention at a certain point so it is important to get to the point very quickly. Take a look at some of Mark’s past episodes to understand even more on how viral marketing can really help your business grow in a whole new direction.

I know the search engine optimization industry at times can get very confusing for people who might not eat, sleep and breath it like some of us do (myself included!) so that is why we write posts like this. If you have launched a blog or have one now that doesn’t get that much traffic some of these steps might help you with the construction of your blog posts. It is important to always optimize your blog posts especially if it is connected to your business site and you are trying to deliver traffic there for some reason or another.

Below are some helpful Blog SEO tips to consider when writing a blog post
(they are not in any particular order, but are all important):

1. Content – Content is going to be the most important aspect of your blog posts. Your content has to not only be good but compelling. It needs to give readers a reason to want to keep reading and to also come back to see what else you got for them. You always want to sprinkle some keywords throughout your text as well. This will get your post climbing in search results.

2. Title – The title of your post is very important. Depending on how your blog is set up will determine whether your title is being pulled into your meta information of your posts. There is a thin line between having a cute title and an SEO title that will actually work to your advantage over time.

3. Post Ending – Don’t be scared to leave your post open ended. Ask a question in the end to trigger some heavy comment action. The comments will only help with the blog posts rankings. It’s kind of like pouring fuel on the fire.

4. Use Lists – Using lists has been known to significantly increase the strength of a blog post. Try making a post that requires a lengthy list in the body and you will see over time that post move around in search results.

5. Paragraphs – Use smaller paragraphs frequently, this keeps the readers attention into a manageable thoughts.

6. Images – Incorporate some images throughout the post. This tremendously helps the user experience.

7. Videos – If you can please locate and include videos that are related to your blog post, sometimes this helps keep visitors longer on your website.

8. Link Building – Yes, you need to promote your blog posts, through your Twitter, Facebook accounts and any of the many good social bookmarking sites out there. Not only will they help spread the word about your great content, drive visitors to your blog, but will also provide a nice link to your blog post.

9. URL of Post – The URL of each post should be short and should reflect the content contained withing the blog post. Keep your blog post URLs short and relevant.

These are just a few main areas you should always consider when writing blog posts. SEO doesn’t just apply to websites but to blogs as well so if you want traffic apply these efforts to your posts once in a while.

Social media marketing has been the talk of the town for the last twelve months to the point that search engine marketing and optimization has almost become the forgotten brother. If social media marketing is working and delivering traffic – great. But wouldn’t it be even better if you could also harness the free traffic available through the search engines.

There is a place for both forms of marketing in most every type business. It is a matter of keeping everything in perspective and working in areas where your business is going to gain the most benefits. Traffic is not necessarily the key – sales or converting traffic is the only way you can hope to stay in business. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen companies that think that a certain social media marketing strategies are the end all be all…best thing for sliced bread. Really spend you time understanding the audiences of each social site to make sure they are a good fit for you company, before you start becoming active on a site. For instance, if you own a real estate company, why become active a social networking website for people outside the united states or a smaller demographic?

Late last month we published a list of the top websites presented by Compete. That list should tell you where best to focus your efforts. Are you spending all day on Twitter? Why? It only receives a small fraction of the traffic compared to the search engines, Facebook and YouTube. There are many businesses than can justify the time spent on Twitter through extra sales or conversions. Others are trying to pump up their business through Twitter when their efforts may be better focused in other areas.

One of the hardest tasks for any business looking to increase their visibility, visitors and sales from the web, is the ability to keep everything in perspective. Online marketing needs to address your businesses needs today, tomorrow and next week. Focus on what is working then look to other areas that offer the potential for growth. By keeping everything in perspective, you will at least maintain your current flow of traffic while waiting for new marketing strategies to bear fruit.

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.

Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse to not pulling up a chair to the dinner table and at least looking at what there is to offer. I don’t generate a huge amount of interaction on Twitter but you think I would when I look at the Google Analytics information. Just because people might not interact with your business on Twitter doesn’t mean they don’t make it over to your website through your profile.

Here are some things all businesses should be doing on Twitter every single day:

Follow: Every business out there must have some sort of competition. Whether immediate or loosely related it doesn’t matter. Sending follow requests to your competitors followers is very important. Some will see that you are following them and instantly follow you back so it is very important to find these people. They are about as targeted as you are ever going to get.

Post Links: I don’t recommend sitting there all day and just dropping links to your website but occasionally it is ok to post a link to a service page or a product page especially if you are running a special promotion or sale on something. Most people won’t mind if you do it tastefully. Don’t drop the link every hour all day long. This will get people turned off by your efforts. If you have a blog each blog post should always be posted into your Twitter account as well.

Retweet: If you see something particular to your industry someone posted I would recommend retweeting it. It will drive more eyeballs to your Twitter page and get that account that you just retweeted on your radar. Plus often times that person you just retweeted might return the favor down the road creating a win win situation all across the board.

Conversation: Reply to people’s posts you might think would be great for your business. Not everyone will respond to you but eventually you will start to build up some nice conversations and some could be the right type of conversations to get your business growing.

These are some efforts every Twitter account should be doing but over time you will find a patter or routine that works best for you. This is just the one that we chose to follow.

For the past 10 years Google has largely dictated the definition of authority for the rest of us. Sure, search engine optimization people may have expanded the definition (sometimes to suit their own purposes), but it was Google who gave us the idea to begin the discussion. It was, of course, all link-based. Your authority, today, is based on the quality of your own content and the quality of the links you attract, based in large part on the authority of the sites doing the linking.

But more and more, Google is swinging social. There’s the acquisition of such sites as YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger. And the startups like Orkut. And, of course, the expanded applications and new directions in search with such offerings as Friend Connect, Google Wave (in beta), personalization, mixed media SERPs, and real-time search. The changeover isn’t complete, but I think Google sees the writing on the wall. The Web is, by nature, social. It always has been. And Google’s mission all along has been to catalog the world’s information. But the big challenge – not just for Google, but all search companies – is in producing the technology that will help people find that information. Search technology has largely been successful, but it has its shortcomings. Social is slowly taking its place.

So the question is, When social media has replaced search completely, and search is largely a social enterprise rather than a robotic one and content driven one, what will authority be based on? Is today’s social proof model the basis of a new kind of authority or will link building still play a part? Are you engaged in the new social media marketing revolution? Do you believe social media and search will ever be inseparable? If so, what will be the basis of authority on the Web?

I personally believe that it comes down to excellent content, building highly relevant links over time (that generate visitors of course) and being social online. The reality is if your business is not connecting with your customers and potential new customers then you are missing out on an aspect…called marketing. Yes, marketing your website and business online I think will build a higher amount of authority and sales. Because really that is what search engine optimization, social media marketing and everything online related is all about, building your business!