• Home
  • About Us
  • PPC
  • SEO
  • Web Design
  • Blog
  • SEM Glossary

Client Login

Start Following Companies On LinkedIN

May 4th, 2010

In the quest to become more social, LinkedIn has made several recent updates. One of the changes that might of slipped thru your radar is the “follow” feature.

Similar to FaceBook’s fan pages, LinkedIn has taken the initiative with the launch of Company Follow. The feature allows users to connect with a company as a means to acquire information updates such as overview, specialties, hiring trends, current employees, business opportunities, and general recent activity.

While this is s step towards FaceBook fan pages for LinkedIN, the big difference is the ability for users to interact through comments. The LinkedIn Company Follow reveals updates to followers, but they do not allow for interactivity via comments.

How To Follow A Company?

1. Profile Page. You can follow a company from a connection’s profile page by clicking on the company they have listed on their profile and clicking the “Follow Company” in the hover bar that appears.

2. Company Profile. Search for a via their name or a keyword and click on their Company Page and click “Follow Company” on the icon to the right.

3. “More”. In the menu bar that appears at the top of your profile, you can find search for companies to follow as indicated above through the company name or keyword or select from the recommended companies.

4. Recommended Companies. In the “More” next to Company Name or Keyword search there is a menu for “Following”. Click on “Following” and companies will be recommended for you to follow. Additionally when you follow your first company, an email is sent to you welcoming you to Company Follow as well as suggesting companies you may want to follow that includes a link to find and follow more companies.

5. Links. As expected, companies and employees will be promoting the link to their company page to follow. Once on the page, simply click “Follow Company”.

Change your mind? Click “Stop” Following” and you are no longer following that company.

Reminder: Don’t forget to follow Sweet Spot Marketing on LinkedIn

Tags: facebook, linkedIn, Social Networking
Posted in Social Networking | Comments Off

 

 

New Google AdWords Certification

April 26th, 2010

Google announced this morning the AdWords Certified Partner Program, a new certification level that marketing and advertising agencies can achieve. This will allow advertisers to ensure their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency is at the top of its class. The new certification will require agencies to take more advanced exams than originally offered in the standard Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) Exam. The new exams focus more on search strategy and analysis versus simply recalling knowledge. In essence, this exam will ensure agencies not only know what to do, but how to do it.

For now the two certifications will coexist. However, Sweet Spot is in the process of taking these tests today  (the first day they are available) to ensure we keep our promise to our clients to be on the cutting edge of search marketing tactics. Proof of this certification will be shown with the below badge.

adwords certified partner logo

New Adwords Certified Partner logo

Tags: Adwords Certifed Partner, Adwords Certification, Google Certification
Posted in Google Adwords, Pay Per Click (PPC) | Comments Off

 

 

Twitter Reveals Promoted Tweets

April 13th, 2010

Twitter revealed today their new platform to monetized their hugely popular site. Called Promoted Tweets, the platform will place advertiser ads as tweets above search results relating to an advertiser’s product or service.  As it stands now, only a few select partners will have their ads shown on Twitter.  If users do not engage with Promoted Tweets by re-tweeting, favoriting, or replying,  they will be taken off the search results.

More details on how the ads will be priced and purchased are rumored to come out later this week at Twitter’s annual Chirp conference. Sweet Spot will keep its client’s and partner’s  posted of any opportunities to advertise on Twitter.

Posted in Social Networking, Twitter | Comments Off

 

 

Facebook Starts Sending Email Reports To Page Administrators

March 19th, 2010

Without warning Facebook has started to email reports to page administrators. The reports provide high level data such as the amount of new fans, posts, comments, and visitors in the last week.

Sweet Spot Marketing got several emails this week from the pages we administer, and looking across the social network landscape, we can see that we are not alone.

A statement from FaceBook confirmed yesterday that the company started sending out the email updates last week as a test to help Page managers “stay up-to-date with their fans and improve the admin experience.”

The emails we received provided the same basic information that we could already gather by logging into FaceBook and clicking on the analytics insights link. The best part about the email is it saves time, which is much appreciated.

These emails have not been welcomed so warmly by all. Some FaceBook page administrators are criticizing this practice for not presenting more data beyond the basics. In general, many Facebook fan page owners are not happy with the amount of data Facebook shares via the email or on the insights page.

I think we all agree that it would be nice if Facebook had something similar to Google Analytics. We hope that this is a step in that direction. As Facebook is getting feedback about the email, they undoubtedly are seeing that the community still wants more.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

 

 

Planning An SEO Friendly Website From The Beginning – Part 2

March 18th, 2010

How To SEO A Website Part 2

In part one we discussed why it’s important to include SEO from the beginning of a web site design project. In part two we will highlight some early web design elements that can help your SEO campaign from the very beginning be “truly optimized”.

By now, most companies have approach a SEO firm for search engine help with a some type of website already built. For some companies the current site investment has been too large to go back and start at step 1. What they really mean when they ask for SEO is what can they optimize with what  they got.

For other companies, throwing away the old site and starting with a blank slate would be the most cost effective form of SEO. A good SEO company will realize what kind of client they are dealing with, and after a site review be able to give you some options.

Realize that the site you came to the table with has already established an online presence with the search engines. The web designer has already made some SEO choices for you. If this is your, the SEO company you hire to optimize within the framework you provided, may be hamstrung to some degree unless you are willing to make serious changes.

SEO Friendly Website Hosting

With any amount of  SEO research it won’t take too long before you hear of 301 redirects, canonicalizing your URL, and developing a custom 404 page. These are great SEO tips, and something you should do, but depending on your hosting it’s not always easy to do.

For example, if you are trying to save money by purchasing shared hosting on a windows server from a common hosting provider, good luck getting them to help you out. Sweet Spot is a big fan of Linux hosted sites because the open source platform provides for a simple fix with FTP access. Most sites today are hosted on either a Windows or Linux based server; however, other servers do exist such as ColdFusion. Knowing your server configuration is important in understanding your limitations and processes with this type of search engine optimization.

SEO Friendly Content Management Systems (CMS)

In 2010 the use of online CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal has exploded very fast. The advantages to having and admin interface that is easy to understand is often important to clients who don’t know HTML but want to update their site. This also is great for developers because they can get accustom to one type of CMS and crank out websites very fast with some advanced functionality.

Content management systems are also very good for growth and content syndication, which are two SEO needs. The scalability and auto-archiving  features these systems bring a tremendous ammount of SEO advantages as well.

From an SEO perspective, these content management systems are all not created equally! Some have a strict set of rules that prohibit the editing of raw HTML. Some were built without SEO in mind which makes optimizing certain page elements difficult if not impossible.

There are several good debates in online forums today about which CMS is best. The honest truth is they all have pros and cons for SEO and non-SEO web features. It really depends on what your goals are. For example, here is a good article by SEOMOZ comparing Wordpress vs. Joomla.

No matter what your web development needs are, an experienced SEO should be able to help you pick the best CMS and web developer to fit your needs.

SEO Friendly Site Navigation

- Can the search engines see my links?
- Why do I have 50 links in the footer that no one ever clicks on?
- Why are my URLs 150 characters long?
- Why is my site a hodgepodge of pages and hard to navigate?

There are hundreds of navigation concerns, too many to cover here. Please don’t leave the sitemap and site architecture up to a designer that cares more about the color than functionality. You’ve got questions; we’ve got answers, just please call a SEO before it’s too late!

Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design | Comments Off

 

 

« Older Entries
  • Latest Blog Posts

    • Start Following Companies On LinkedIN
    • New Google AdWords Certification
    • Twitter Reveals Promoted Tweets
    • Facebook Starts Sending Email Reports To Page Administrators
    • Planning An SEO Friendly Website From The Beginning – Part 2
  • Archives

    • May 2010
    • April 2010
    • March 2010
    • January 2010
    • December 2009
    • November 2009
    • October 2009
    • September 2009
    • August 2009
    • July 2009
    • June 2009
    • May 2009
    • April 2009
    • March 2009
    • February 2009
    • January 2009
  • Categories

    • Bing (3)
    • Google (7)
    • Pay Per Click (PPC) (7)
      • Google Adwords (4)
      • Local Search (2)
      • Microsoft AdCenter (1)
    • Pay Per Click (PPC) (7)
    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (8)
    • Social Networking (2)
      • Twitter (1)
    • Sweet Spot Marketing (7)
    • Uncategorized (2)
    • Web Design (3)
    • Yahoo (2)
    • Yahoo Sponsored Search (2)

Sweet Spot Marketing is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).