Guia básica sobre marketing social en Internet

Esta guia os puede servir de ayuda sobre todo para convencer a vuestro jefe que el Marketing Social en Internet no es un broma.

fuente: www.seomoz.org  Posted by randfish

I’ve been asked several times to give presentations on the basics of social media marketing, and have now refined my 15 minute introductory tour to the point where I think it’s fairly good (and I’m really damn picky about my presentations). The following presentation (in visual and text form) should be helpful for anyone trying to convince their bosses, team or cohorts that investing in SMM is a worthwhile pursuit. Enjoy!

SECTION I: What is Social Media Marketing?

Before we ask that, we really need to start with the goals of online marketing as a whole!

• Basic Things Like:
  • Web Site Traffic
  • Conversions and Sales
  • Page Views & Ad Exposure
• More Complex Things Like:
  • Growing Brand Awareness
  • Creating Positive Brand Association
  • Business Development & Networking

Guess What? Social Media Marketing Can Help with All of These Things.

How, you might ask?

The first step is social interaction over the web. Platforms like Wikipedia (in the Web 2.0 world) or even forums and chatrooms (way back in the ’90’s) let ordinary users reach hundreds or thousands of other web-savvy people.

You + Wikipedia = Your Content in Front of Lots of Eyeballs

SMM also involves the practice of viral content creation and promotion. By building content on your website that’s inherently alluring to a web-based audience, you can attract positive attention of all kinds.

In the example above, this singles map, showing the distribution of cities in the US with high/low men-to-women ratios, was “spread” across the web after it was promoted on Digg. The content’s creator, National Geographic magazine, hadn’t enabled the map to be visible in an online format, so the owner of a dating website actually re-published the image and built up a considerable amount of mindshare and relevant links.

Technical goals, like control of the search results to help with reputation management, are also a part of SMM’s appeal. You can push down negative listings, swarm competitors, and build high ranking pages that can drive secondary traffic to your site(s).

The image above shows the power of social media profiles – a search at Google returns pages and pages of my profiles at various sites where I’m a regular contributor (and plenty where I’ve barely contributed at all, too).

Social media’s power lies in its ability to engage the “right” kind of participants. Key influencers are heavily overrepresented in social media (and the blogosphere), and immense value can come from getting your brand/content/product in front of their eyes.

SECTION II: Why is Engagement with Social Media Valuable?

Because social media supports both branding and mindshare goals

See? Branding on the left, mindshare on the right.

Social media participation can also bolster your search marketing goals. The engines want to see high quality, frequent, editorial links pointing to your site as a pre-requisite to rankings. The social web allows marketers to reach audiences who can provide these valuable links, giving them an edge on their less social competition.

SMM is also, obviously, great for traffic and even conversion rates. Social sites like Digg, Reddit, and popular blogs drive tens of thousands of visitors, and while those users frequently won’t engage directly with your brand right away, they’ve now had a “branded experience” and are more likely to have positive associations and a brand memory in the future, both of which will serve to increase conversion rates.

SECTION III: Why Now? Why Has Social Media Suddenly Become So Important?

Because social media has suddenly become very, very popular.

The chart above shows that year over year, 2007 was a breakout for user-generated content and participatory sites. The bottom half tells the story of opportunity – social media marketers have an opportunity to contribute and shape the social web before the noise of millions of users makes a single voice impossible to hear.

A few quotes from studies performed in the last 2 years stand out, including:

Brand Advocates have emerged online as primary influencers, with at least a two to one rate of converting an actual friend or family member to buy the same product or brand…

…Brand Advocates are incredibly valuable to marketers because they are better connected consumers with a larger sphere of influence…

…Social Media is the Key – Study findings showed that Brand Advocates are taking full advantage of social media tools and actively leveraging them for product purchases. Through instant messaging, chat, community, photo sites and blogging, Brand Advocates are able to influence their vast online social circle…

 Source: Yahoo! + ComScore Study on Brand Advocates - December 2006

Passionistas heavily engage with communities of like-minded consumers who use email, text messaging, and instant messaging significantly more than typical users, and are more likely to create and share user-generated content online such as photos, blog posts or videos about their passions. Because of their intense engagement around sharing information about their passions through digital media, Passionistas are natural brand advocates and 52% more likely than typical users to recommend or influence others about brands aligning with them.

Brands that stimulate conversation among passionate consumers will be rewarded through the credibility that comes from trusted word of mouth,” said Jim Kite, President of Connections Research and Analytics at MediaVest. “Accessing Passionistas online also offers the ability to track this valuable group’s media consumption habits, enabling brands to optimally – and accountably – leverage their advocacy power

Source: Yahoo! Passionistas Report – September 2007

If that doesn’t convince you, read on:

It’s not surprising for most Internet users to find that influencers of all varieties are heavily engaged with the web in general (and the blogosphere in particular), but it’s amazing to imagine that US influencers are actually trailing countries like China, South Korea, & Japan in blog engagement.

SECTION IV: How Does SMM Help with SEM?

Remember back to a time long ago when search engines weren’t too smart? There it is – just about 1997. Altavista and Lycos and NorthernLight were scanning keywords and meta tags, trying to sort out who repeated the phrase “dancing baby gif” the most.

Obviously, these primitive engines didn’t last long, and with the evolution and popularization of link-based algorithms, search engines became smarter. However, the gaming continued. Once search marketers learned of the biases towards links, the Internet starting flooding with “non-editorially given links” based on a desire to manipulate the rankings of the engines. These links were never intended to be clicked, and the motivations behind them weren’t to “endorse the quality or relevance of another site’s content.”

The “links as votes” algorithms could only persist so long as links were truly meant as votes – and with the Pandora’s box of PageRank spilling across the web, the search engines had to resort to better and more careful analyses of which links to count. Thus, they developed advanced algorithms for calculating trust, segmenting pages, watching for spikes of unnatural link activity, and generally cramping down on the search world’s less cautious manipulators.

With tactics like link farms, reciprocal schemes, paid link networks,and forum, guestbook, and blog spamming all going the way of the Dodo, websites that wanted to rank atop the engines needed to return to the roots of organic marketing. This re-ignited the age old conflict of the marketer vs. the trusted source – how does a company get their product or service in front of the right people to let it spread editorially?

This phenomenon brings us to a string of fundamental questions… and their answers

#1 – Who Creates Links on the Web?

Oh, right… It’s these guys:

I like to call them the Linkerati, but they are, in essence, merely an extension of the offline world’s influencers – journalists, traveling salesmen, and your neighbor Jessica, who always has some new remarkable product or company to tell you about. The Linkerati are powerful – they own the editorially given link structure of the web, and this brings us to our second question…

#2 – How Can Marketers Reach the Linkerati?

Oh, right… Social Media Marketing! Through the sites and blogs that Linkerati frequent and are influenced by, we can build a marketing campaign that uses content-based strategies to get in front of the right people. But, is getting in front of them enough? Can we play a passive role once our brand has been seen? Or, do we need to do something more – perhaps ask another question.

#3 – How Do Influencers Spread Content?

Oh right… We’re going to need to know this if we want our Linkerati to socially spread our ideas. Lucikly, I’ve got this handy bullet point list:

• Email to friends and associates
• Share via social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
• Vote up at social news portals (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Mixx, Propeller)
• Link to from Blog posts and comments
• Discuss at forums and groups
• Spread via word-of-mouth directly to colleagues and contacts
• Link to on their websites
• Broadcast via multimedia (video, podcasts)
• Mainstream media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines)

Not all of these are inherently trackable, but many of them are, and by measuring successes against failures in the online world, we’ll be able to get a sense of what plays with the Linkerati.

#4 – What Types of Content Are Likely to Become Viral?

This final question comes after months and years of experience and in many cases, its uniquely tailored to your specific industry or niche. Luckily, we’re not really going to leave you hanging – Jane’s new linkbait guide is out today, and although it’s part of our premium content, it does a fantastic job of explaining the ins and outs of why some content succeeds while others falter. In the interim, this chart is pretty useful, too:

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this social media basics presentation in blog format. For those who’d prefer, you can download the whole thing in Microsoft Powerpoint here as well.

p.s. I did not end up giving this presentation at Pubcon Las Vegas – instead, I asked the audience to vote between this and a more advanced walkthrough of social media sites, and more than 90% opted for the latter. I’ve asked that no one blog or reveal the contents therein, but we will have it available for download behind the premium content curtain at the request of a very smart audience member

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Tags: marketingsocial en Internet

¿Dónde pongo mis palabras clave ?

Des de i-Marketing Consulting, ayudamos a empresas a mejorar su posicionamiento mediente la buena elección de palabras clave a posicionar y sobretodo sabiendo donde colocar estas palabras clave en la web de la empresa.
En esta artículo podeis ver muy claramente como poner vuestras palabras clave en vuestra web, para mejorar vuestro posicionamiento, y si no mejora, ya sabes a quién acudir .

fuente: www.seomoz.com – Posted by randfish on Mon (12/17/07)

Keyword Usage & Targeting

Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for “dog,” it’s extremely wise to make sure the word “dog” is part of the indexable content of your document.

Kewyords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go something like this:

When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data, such as the order of the words (“running shoes” vs. “shoes running”), spelling, punctuation and capitalization of those terms provide additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.

For obvious reasons, search engines meaure the ways keywords are used on pages to help determine the “relevance” of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to “optimize” a page’s rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text and meta data.

The Myth of Keyword Density

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase “keyword density” seems to arise. This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth in this guide, I’ll simply reference Dr. Edel Garcia seminal work on the topic – The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

The notion of keyword density values predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an IR concept. What is worse, KD plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents or assign weights to terms. Why then many optimizers still believe in KD values? The answer is simple: misinformation

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both documents KD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword density analyzer does not establishes which document is more relevant. A density analysis or KD ratio tells us nothing about:

1. the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)
2. where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
3. the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)
4. the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics and relevacy.

Dr. Garcia’s background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help “optimize” a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization – without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet’s collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.

However, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms (as we’ve discussed in Section I: Retrieval & Rankings), and we can still leverage some effective “best practices” for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to “optimized.” Here at SEOmoz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. When we work with our clients, this is the process we recommend:

Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.  More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings. 
At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag as search engines consider them equivalent (note: at this time we’ve only actually tested Google for the <b> vs. <strong> equivalency).
At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can sometimes bring valuable traffic.
Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the ”snippet” of text used by the search engines. 
Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself, pointing to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex – see this blog post for details).

An optimal page for the phrase “running shoes” would thus look something like:

Keyword usage is NOT an exact science, and it is certainly valuable to engage in testing, tweaking and experimentation on your own sites and pages. Just keep in mind that user experience shoud never be sacrificed for the sake of optimization – search engines want the same things as humans, and generally speaking, if your page can earn one or two extra links by providing great content, this will far outweigh any benefit from stuffing an extra keyword repetition. SEOmoz’s Term Targeting tool is designed to help accomplish precisely this feat and provides a grade to indicate how well (or poorly) a particular page is following the above suggestions.

As you perform keyword targeting, remember that search engines have advanced semantic analysis abilities – this means that they can not only detect whether your page has the right keywords on it, but whether that page is actually targeting the proper subject(s). Thus, embedding keywords as we’ve described above with perfect precision on a page that’s actually about laser hair removal is going to be immediately apparent to the search engines. Instead of merely inserting keywords on a page and expecting rankings, make sure that the document itself contains high quality content describing or on the topic of your keyword of choice.

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In the next installment, I’ll finish up the basics of search-engine friendly design and cover:

• Titles, URLs, Meta Data and Semantic Markup
• Information Architecture
• Canonicalization and Duplicate Versions of Content
• Redirection, Hosting & Server Issues

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