Online marketer James Beswick has published “Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” with San Francisco web consultants One Uproar. This new book provides up-to-date information for online marketers including emphasis on social media, creating content and providing local relevance for visitors.

“Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” is now available at Amazon.com, and has a companion website at http://ranking-number1.com.

Like many of you I’ve been told to do more with less. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner we have smaller budgets and need to gain more traction. The landscape of how to communicate your business to the public has changed and shifted so much in the last five years. I find myself reading, tweeting, and learning. I love it. There is an amazing opportunity now to ramp up your companies’ presence online for very little spend. So, I thought I would share my results and what has been working for me lately.

• Get your website up to snuff. Whether you use Drupal or WordPress, do something. The platform doesn’t really matter. Get a good designer to help you make a splash but develop your site on a platform in which YOU can make edits, upload new images, change copy when you need to. You’ll look like a superstar—it will take minutes out of your day to upload that latest press release, news coverage, or new image. Plus you’re saving your company money by executing these small changes yourself. For me WordPress is what I use for my art website and Drupal is my company’s platform. If implemented correctly both platforms are easy to maintain and update.
• Advertising – If you want to skip print media for now try Google AdWords. It’s inexpensive but you will need to check and fine tune your key words. It will take some time to find the right ad content for your business so start out slow with a small spend per day.
  • SEO – I am no SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert but I’ve done the following to help my companies’ ranking and also employed the same techniques for other businesses:
    • Google Map Profile – It’s free—just go to Google and create a Gmail account for your business and a map profile. This helps index your site and elevate organic searches for your business.
    • Google Analytics – Also free—set it up on Google by copying the code they give you onto your website. You really be able to see who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting—the reporting is very detailed and you can cut and paste this onto any report for presentations.
    • Web copy – Writing the actual copy for your website does take a lot of time. Key words and repetition within the site is what Google and other search engines look for. Spend time thinking about what key words are revelent to your business and then see how you can weave these into your overall copy.
    • Website updates – It’s important that you update your website as often as possible. Whether you’re posting a news coverage, sending out a new update on Twitter, LinkedIn or posting to your blog this tells Google that your website is relevant and an active business.
    • Social Media. We’ve all been hearing about it. It’s free—yes it takes up your time but get your feet wet and start trying them slowly. For me I’m a one person show so I symphathize with many of you who are operating with limited staff. I started by creating our Linkedin profile initially and just recently started Twitter. Think about social media as platforms that work together. Twitter is your platform to send links to the world and short reminders. Blogs are where you should be posting longer content.

• Create your company’s Linkedin profile. It does matter—whether you’re an individual business owner or a large company—this is the online hub to “record” yourself to the world. If you’re an individual business owner—this is your online resume and fact sheet. It’s really the same for any size company. If you work for a larger organization rally employees to create profiles on Linkedin. Get HR to post that next job opening. This one is easy for you to maintain—once your profile is created you’re just editing and maintaining. Linkedin is a very standard profile all companies should have.

• Create a Twitter profile. Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm yourself. For me it’s literally just me supporting Twitter so I sent out a tweet once a week. I also “build” content in the background and try to send out more content when I can. Take advantage of these platforms—they’re free and just require your time. This is another platform that you can get your subject matter experts within the company involved. Collaborate with your business experts and sales to create short, content subjects that your clients care about. It’s not about how great your company is. Put yourself in the seat of the customer—what do they want to know? What criteria or search is involved in reaching your company, your product, or your service? What’s your view on the your industry? This type of content will create traction and get those followers!

• Blogs. Do you need to post to your blog daily? If you can but try starting by posting once a week. Remember this is your platform to post longer content—at least 300 words. Test out different types of content you’ll find what will work for your industry. Keep it fun—post something that isn’t too time intensive on your part every now and then.

• Video. Many of us don’t have the budget to hire a professional video expert. Buy a video camera and tripod and start recording—for my company’s website it’s about our business process and value proposition so maybe we’ll record projects, brown bag seminars, public speaking events and even a quarterly “tv” spot to our customers–you get the idea. Post to YouTube and get it on your website.

Here are some great companies and sites to visit for services:

• 415 Systems – http://www.415systems.com – WordPress web design, SEO and SEM services
• Hubspot – http://hubspot.com – Online Marketing tools helping you to find customers
• Af83inc. – http://af83inc.com/ – Drupal web design, SEO and SEM services
• Google Tools – http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/services/var_1.html

See Wendy’s Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wenbryant.

Are your social efforts taking too much time? Are you struggling to find content, manage posting and justify your time? Remember, social is like any other channel you’re already using. You first need a plan and strategy. Would you execute a direct marketing campaign or ad campaign without a target, plan or strategy?

1. Strategy & Plan – create a strategy and plan. It doesn’t need to be as comprehensive as your yearly  marketing plan. Your social strategy is just like all the other channels you use to drive your marketing efforts.  It should roll up to the overall marketing and communications strategy. Don’t get caught up in creating a complicated strategy.  A strategy is simply an idea that grows into a larger concept.

For example, if one of your strategies is to position your company as a leader and expert, this should drive some of what you do in the social space. Maybe a company blog is the answer or perhaps you have a team of experts at your company that can “share” the blog duty. Having a strategy and plan for social will produce better results and provide you with the process of eliminating some not so great ideas.

2. Market Research – You’ve written your strategy and plan…now what? Ask yourself these questions so you can determine what social strategies/platforms are right for your business and your company:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. What are the demographics? Age?
3. Buying decision? Geographical preference?
4. Is your company a B2C model?
5. Are you selling directly to other businesses (B2B)?
6. Do you have a product or products to market?
7. How do your customers find you?
8. What is your  competition doing?
9. How do your customers communicate?

I’m not proposing you go out and conduct complex marketing research. Not all companies cannot afford such efforts, but you should be able to answer these questions to determine how your customers communicate, listen, buy and refer.

3. Social Platforms – Your choice of social platforms depends largely on the type of business your company is in and whether you are producing a product or service.  If you are unsure hire a marketing consultant or consult with your creative agency. Make sure you are thinking through what makes sense for your business. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

4. Company Blogs – Any B2C or B2B business should be able to have a company blog. There are hurdles for regulated industries but for the most part this is a common platform.  Blogs for B2B can be very effective at communicating expertise and education. B2C businesses use company blogs to showcase their expertise around how they develop products or perhaps tell clients about trends in their industry that can influence buying decisions. A word of caution on a blogging: share the duty; do not place the responsilbility of blogging on one person. Create  a team of people who can be held accountable and will produce meaningful content.

5. Video – Videos are a great way to demonstrate visually what your company does.  I just watched this one recently. The video called, “Will the iPad blend” has over 4 million views on You Tube.  We can’t all go “viral” but think about how you can cleverly showcase what your company is doing. Think outside the box. Remember to always test your idea with this simple question: “Why should I care?”  You need to be creative and think about what your client cares about, how you can link into their thought process and get in front of them.

6. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – All are widely used platforms.  My advice is to make sure they “fit” your target audience.

7. Social Management Tools – There are many tools that help you manage content on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Try Hootsuite– you can post across all three networks, schedule content and manage lists.  Tweet Deck is a free tool specific to Twitter which manages content for Twitter only. I like Hootsuite because it works across multiple platforms. If you haven’t been able to attend an event with Guy Kawasaki on social then fit it in. He is an expert in the space and will be able to provide you with ideas to help manage your content, build up a following and tell the world what your company is doing.

If your social initiatives are proving to be time draining go back to your strategy and plan.  Social should be manageable just like all your other channels. Remember: always be testing. Good marketers are continuing to test the waters , try out new ideas and tweak what they are doing.

Many organizations spend a large portion of their budget on website design and then neglect the site’s hosting. Given all the effort needed to drive visitors to a website, it’s essential that the site is fast, responsive and available because you have only one opportunity to convert the visitor.

Finding reliable web hosting companies can take time – the ones we have used and stayed with tend to offer the following features:

1. 24-hour support: the web is a 24/7 marketplace and websites can have issues at any time of the day. When a server crashes at 3am, it’s essential to have a phone number that will be answered immediately by someone with deep technical knowledge. It pays to place a few test calls to companies before committing your site to their servers.
2. Reasonable pricing: the web is awash with $5/month hosts that any company with a serious approach to online marketing should avoid. These hosts operate by loading hundreds – sometimes thousands – of clients onto a single machine, and your site’s performance will be at the mercy of those other sites. In hosting, low pricing should absolutely not be a priority.
3. Automatic backups: there are many things that can go wrong on websites, so it’s essential to take daily backups. All quality hosting companies offer hourly or daily back up services.
4. Clear uptime guarantees: most services offer 99.9% uptime, which sounds good but in reality means your site will be unavailable for up to 87 hours a year. In some cases this may be acceptable but for a busy e-commerce site, 99.99% would be the minimum target. Increasing uptime requirements does increase cost and in some cases can complicate site deployment.
5. Unlimited emails: many hosts place restrictions on the number of emails each account can send. While a restriction of 10,000 per day may be reasonable for many sites, there are many services that limit the site to 50 per day and delete the rest. Establish what the limits ahead of opening an account.
6. SSL capabilites: while you may not need any secure pages initially, it’s reasonably likely that at some point you will. SSL is more complicated to set up that you might think, so selecting a company that is comfortable with SSL certificates is essential.
7. Cpanel administration: this is a widely established administration tool for Linux servers that handles everything from email routing to installing popular server applications. By presenting a friendly GUI on top of otherwise complex operations, cpanel is a major time saver, and outperforms competing administration tools.
8. Unlimited options: make sure your host allows unlimited databases, email  accounts, sub-domains and FTP accounts. There’s no reason to limit these. Unlimited bandwidth and disk storage are useful options, but there is always a limitation in the fine print (for example, you may be prevented from hosting the next YouTube). Providing these restrictions are acceptable given your predicted traffic, this should not be a problem.
9. Being the actual web host. There is a large industry in reselling web services and it can be difficult to determine if you are working with the host itself or a reseller. The major problem with resellers is that support issues can take longer to resolve, and sometimes the reselling company is not familiar with the technology.
10. Recommendations: while not really a feature, make sure that the company hosts sites similar to yours, and find out what those customers think of their hosting. This is a good way to discover any hidden problems, such as extreme latency, server unavailability or billing issues.

One Uproar recommends…

We have had long-term relationships with each of the companies below, and have no hesitation in vouching for their reliability and support:

Naming goes to the heart of branding.  A name is the foundation upon which a company builds all its other assets.  A good name is memorable and more importantly stands for something and supports the brand.  A well-chosen name has to also look good with the primary mark/logo and be easily translated in an e-mail or text message. It is the essential way a company communicates its value to the world. A company’s name is repeated over and over, in every form of communication: email, mailings, letters, brochures, proposals, pitches, website and almost every conversation that happens in and outside of a company.

The wrong name can damage the brand.

Why would anyone want to short-cut the process or skip it entirely? You’d be surprised—a lot of companies, big or small, do not always see the value in investing the time and dollars into the process.  It is not uncommon for a business owner to think naming is easy and not want to engage with a branding expert or creative agency.  They mistakenly conclude that naming is unnecessary, a task that they can do on their own or that they cannot afford to test a name.

Marketers know that naming is just the beginning: there’s the message, positioning, primary mark, typography, colors, and all the tactical elements and strategies of how the brand reaches the world at large.

Who are the most likely candidates for naming?

• A newly formed company.
• Companies that have expanded and grown to a point where their current name and perhaps even message no longer conveys the business they are now conducting.
• Companies who have merged or gone through an ownership change. Not only a new name but a new identity may be necessary to communicate the merged company.

According to Alina Wheeler, author of “Designing Brand Identity”here are a few qualities of an effective name:

• Meaningful – It communicates something about the essence of the brand and supports the image the company wants to convey.
• Distinctive – It’s unique, easy to remember, easy to pronounce and spell. The biggest thing here: it is differentiated from the competition.
• uture-Oriented - It positions the company for growth, change and success. It has sustainability and preserves possibilities.
• Modular – It enables a company to build brand extensions with ease.
• Protectable- It can be owned and trademarked. A domain is available.
• Positive – It has positive connotations in the markets it’s serving.
• Visual - It lends itself well to graphic presentation in a logo or primary mark and in the brand architecture.

Naming is a daunting task and takes time. I think that is the most important point I want to make: time. Give yourself time. This is not a process you should rush. You’ll be pleased once you’ve invested the time and energy. Remember an agency or branding expert will help you but you, as a business owner, need to be engaged, thoughtful and committed.

So, how do you get started?

1. Consider hiring a branding expert or creative agency to help you with the process. Branding experts are also individual consultants and can work with you based on your time and budget.
2. Set up a process and criteria.
3. Revisit your brand position and message.
4. Establish brainstorming sessions.
5. Do your research. Look at the competition. Research domain names.
6. Keep a running list of companies that are similar to your service.  It’s important to stay abreast of your competition and what they are doing.
7. Once you have your top three names test them. Ask your network. Ask potential customers (if you’re a new business) and existing customer (if you’re established)—people you have a close working relationship that will provide meaningful feedback.
8. The most important step is the legal one. Make sure the final name chosen goes through all the legal screens. Engage your attorney. Do not do this on your own.

Remember naming is the most important task a company or individual takes on. A good name is not only the cornerstone of how a company gets its message out to the public but the way a company conveys its value to the community. Put the time in and do it right.

Today’s post shows some simple methods for tricking Google into giving any page number one ranking. In this example, we have used these methods to rank #1 on the search term “Coffee”. If you follow these tips for any similar term, it should only take a few hours before you rank on the top slot:

1. Repeat coffee keywords in 30% in web page site

The trick here is to bury your landing page in a directory nested 3 levels deep using your keyword, in our case /coffee/coffee/coffee. Google uses the URL to detect content, and knows the content to be especially relevant when it sees the term repeated 3 times. This is true even if your main domain name isn’t keyword-related, such as http://oneuproar.com.

2. Using meta tags to devastating effect.

The keywords meta tag is one of the main ways Google determines the content of the page, and it’s important to put as many variants on a keyword here as possible. For example, for coffee, we have “injected” the terms coffee house, coffee, coffee beans, caffeine, barista and more. Because Google knows the words are related and put together as closely as possible, it ranks this page as being “super relevant”:

3. Create a Flash splash intro page.

When visitors go to your site, they expect to be welcomed with a 15-20 second animation that shows your company’s mission statement animated in front of them before they enter the main site. It’s important to put your keywords in this flash video, as shown in the screen capture below. Google’s search spider has trouble seeing words that move quickly, and using this technique gets by their keyword filter and straight into the index.

4. Use frames on each page.

This tip is works especially well for Google Chrome, which makes your site rank higher if it’s installed on your computer. Carve your site into 5 frames, putting one page of content in each frame so that to see the whole page would require two monitors or an iPhone turned sideways. In our example, we have put coffee-related words amongst the copy, changing even our contact address to 1000 Coffee St, Coffeetown for maximum effect.

5. Set your navigation in the footer.

Google measures the amount of time each visitor spends on each page – the longer the time, the higher the ranking. The easiest way to achieve this is to hide your site’s navigation deep in the footer so the user has to spend valuable time hunting around for it. Since you also get credit for the number of pages they view (known as “page views), take a page out of Citibank’s play-book and make the menu titles meaningless so they have to try each one in the hope of finding what they want.

6. Keyword density is key in your ad copy:

Take a look at the web copy on the primary page of our coffee site: you should ensure that your keywords are exactly 8% of your copy. Since Google semantically knows which words are related, we can interchange “coffee” with cappuccino, latte and Americano for extra credit, though the vanilla chai soy latte is not in this version of Google’s index. Don’t go over 8% though or your copy will start to sound like those ads in Sunday newspapers.

One Uproar Coffee – History

One of the great things about coffee is caffeine, which is the same name as Google’s new search engine, Caffeine. Using Caffeine, One Uproar Coffee can make cappuccinos, lattes, Americanos and other coffee products. The person who make the coffee in the coffee bar is a called a Barista, one of the few coffee house job names that descends directly from Latin. Barista is Latin is for “coffee grinder” since coffee beans had to be ground before the invention of electricity.

How much coffee can you drink?

Coffee lovers are known to drink as many as 12 cups of delicious coffee a day, though this number is much higher in IT departments. The blood caffeine level in human adults varies depending on the beverage – coffee, cappuccino or latte – and the height. Coffee is good for you, but you should stop when the heart palpitations start.

7. Buy some Google AdWords

This is an insider trick and works amazingly well – have you ever noticed how the biggest sites in the highest rankings also have Google ads running? Basically, putting up the occasional ad is a way of paying Google for the free listing, so they thank you back by bumping your site up the rankings. Before the days of AdWords, SEO experts used to send $20 bills in the mail to Mountain View, but now you can just find keywords with a high cost per click.

Warning: don’t use Yahoo or Bing advertising if you want to use this method. Google knows when you’re advertising with competitors and will send your site the way of Web Van.

8. Use pop-up windows.

Popups are supported by every major browser and can be used to add “hits” to your “pageviews”. When a visit “visits” your site, make sure to have at least one popup, so that the page appears to be viewed twice. Since Google can tell how many windows on a client computer are pointing to the same page, having at least two shows that the page is really important.

Another trick is to make a popup hide the other search results in Google: the One Uproar Coffee Shop site was able to move Starbucks out of the way by by popping up wherever their site appeared. We captured those clicks and redirected users back to our site. There are rumors this morning that this tactic was so effective that Starbucks’ sale are down by double-digits this morning.

James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and committed to ranking number one for every broad search term imaginable, especially on April 1.

Email campaigns still have excellent ROI compared with various other online and offline marketing channels, but there are some important caveats to consider before cutting and pasting your model page from Dreamweaver into Constant Contact or Vertical Response.

Here are 10 essential tips to bear in mind that will affect the quality of the rendered version when it arrives in your recipients’ mailboxes.

1. Avoid the “One Big Image” approach

It’s still common for marketers to build the email message in InDesign or PhotoShop and send the resulting JPG as One Big Image in a small amount of HTML. While this (almost) guarantees perfect rendering in almost any email client, there are some big problems:

• Most corporate users have their images turned off by default, so they won’t see anything.
• Mobile users won’t thank you for sending a 200-300K image instead of a comparatively tiny HTML version.
• Users can’t cut-and-paste or otherwise interact with the content.
• Spam filters are more like to block the email.

Breaking up your design into HTML, images and text can lead to a result that looks 95% similar and avoids these pitfalls.

2. CSS won’t work as expected – use tables

Even though CSS has revolutionized website development, email clients are a long way behind the curve – as in years behind. For reliable rendering of your email newsletter, you’ll have to use HTML tables and minimal inline CSS – 1996 standards still rule in the world of email. Ironically, finding an older design tool such as FrontPage is more likely to give you dependable results than the newest version of Dreamweaver. This means nested tables are still the way to go for email campaigns, especially for those in-browser clients such as Gmail or Yahoo!. Incidentally, spacer images are often not reliable anymore, especially if images are disabled at the client.

If you must use CSS, make sure you store it below the body tag, since it will likely be stripped out otherwise. And don’t use any handy CSS abbreviations either!

3. Test, test and test again

There are a wide range of email clients out there and the easiest way to make sure your final email works as expected in all of them is to use services such as Litmus or Email on Acid. It’s definitely not safe to assume that most of your target audience uses Outlook or Gmail. These services provide useful and actionable feedback on anything that goes wrong in the test. Everytime you make changes to the email, make sure you test once more before the email goes out the door.

4. Look at the Best of Breed

For inspiration and advice, it’s hard to not admire emails from companies such as ProFlowers, American Airlines and Peet’s Coffee. Since you can view the source of any email, dissecting these is not hard to do and illustrates some of the best techniques for creating results that look like great Web 2.0 webpages. Obviously, don’t copy these designs verbatim, but use them as an educational tool.

Many of these examples create the look and feel of dynamic webpages with menu and video, but the clicks are farmed out to the real webpages to do the heavy lifting. Since users are familiar with rich webpages, they not only generate superior click-through rates but show precisely what the user was clicking in order to reach their desired landing page.

Take a look at Inbox Award for some additional ideas.

5. Keep it narrow – and short

If you’re using fixed width designs, consider 600 pixels to be an absolute maximum, and if you’re using fluid layouts so much the better. Users invariably won’t scroll to the right to find content that’s disappeared outside the window.

The same is true for length – your email should be a teaser to a landing page, rather than a 3,000-word opus. If you have a long and important case study, present this through your web site rather than an email (though use the email as an introduction).

6. Test your image file sizes

It’s still common for designers to embed images that are rendered as 100-pixel thumbnails linking to 3MB originals on the server – the net effect is that the email takes a (very) long time to completely load. Since print quality is largely not an issue in email, make sure that small graphics are stored as small graphics, and not rescaled in the HTML. As an aside, always make sure that the size attributes (height and width) are specified for each image.

7. Wrap the whole email in a table

And then nest everything else inside, using more tables to set spacing. Set the widths of each cell in the table rather than the table itself, and if you want to use a background color, set this as an attribute of the outermost table. Personally, I prefer a white background for email campaigns, just for readability.

8. Handing paragraphs

While <br/>’s and <DIV>s are still common with inline CSS, paragraphs have become more reliable in recent times – you can use ‘margin’ inline through CSS for each paragraph to get really specific. If spacing is really important to you, then cellpadding through tables is still the most dependable way to achieve this.

9. Video isn’t there yet.

Since you can’t use JavaScript or the Object tag, you should avoid video in your emails. This doesn’t mean you can’t fake it, showing a static video frame with a play button icon, for example, which links to a landing page with the actual video. It looks like this limitation will be gone with HTML5, but it will be a while before the majority of email recipients are using clients that will support such hightechery.

10. Keep it simple.

While it’s true that you must code for the lowest common denominator, such as Lotus Notes, it’s also true that readers respond well to simple emails that elegantly convey their message. Email such as Eden’s newsletter are superbly well-designed and certainly within the reach of simple code that will work in 99% of email clients. If you find yourself using dozens of fonts, colors, divs and columns, it may just be overcomplicated.

James Beswick is the Founder of OneUproar and is a big believer in simple emails with a clear, one-click Unsubscribe option.

While Twitter is ridiculed by Twitnoobs and amateurs for mundane updates such as “I’m watching my cat… asleep”, the service has been taken to the next level by those who have embraced its realtime, geo-tagged, verbose and follower-driven world. Here are 10 clever ways to use Twitter that demonstrate its potential.

Use Twitter for Server Status and Job Reports

Twitter is, at heart, one big messaging system. If you have endless email and server jobs running that fire off success/failure emails, why not ditch the emails and get the cron jobs to Tweet out the result? You can create a Twitter ID with private tweets so only you and permitted followers can see the data. Personally, I’d rather receive Tweets than email for “this just happened” status updates.

Use Twitter for Inventory Alerts

Want to create some buzz among your customers when only 10 widgets are left, or there’s been a sudden price drop on a hot product? Rather than post updates to your website or print flyers, it’s simple to create a quick Tweet driven by your inventory system. There’s never been a more effective way to communicate time-sensitive price and inventory events to your customer base. And “once it’s gone, it’s gone”-style offers tend to generate a dedicated following.

Use Twitter to Find Your Most Effective Keywords

Getting traffic-rich keywords is the holy grail of SEO – it’s hard to do, but if you track your Tweets with tools such as su.pr, you can quickly start to see which topics interest your audience and drive your website’s content around those keywords. Su.pr provides metrics around which links are being followed (among many other things), and your most popular Tweets and keywords are probably not the ones you think they are.

Use Twitter Lists for SEO

If you use Twitter, you’re probably using lists by now, but maybe haven’t realized the inherent SEO benefits created by Google indexing:

• Make your lists public.
• Make lists selective (20-40 users).
• Embed keyword phrases in your list names (“Texas SEO advice”, not just “SEO”).
• Refer to your Twitter lists in blog posts and Tweet them (they have real URLs such as this SEO experts list).

Use Twitter to Monitor Your Competitors

Twitter for the most part is completely open and public. For many industries, it provides a rich source for understanding your competitors’ behavior, especially since you can mine their Tweet history. What time of month are they sending out specials? What kind of promotions are they pushing? What’s their retweet ratio (search RT @mycompetitor in Google)? While you’re there, take a look at their followers and followees, and follow the most active and appropriate users.

Use Twitter for Instant Crowdsourced Responses

On my private Twitter ID (@jbeswick), I’ve managed to get immediate and useful advice on topics as diverse from the best proconsumer camcorders to the best breakfast tacos in Austin. This isn’t restricted to your follower list: a properly tagged question will be found by thousands of other users who watch hashtags such as #canon #taco and #keepaustinweird. The truly remarkable part is the speed in which people respond, and the quality of advice crammed into 140 characters.

Use Twitter to Find Local Customers

Want to know what people around you are saying about your products, industry or services? The Twitter advanced search allows you to search for pertinent keywords, phrases or hashtags that are happening around a certain area (such as what people think about Costco within 50 miles of San Francisco). There are no other tools – online or offline – that could provide this realtime local insight to provide leads and potential customers.

Use Twitter to Find Employees

Companies are getting deluged with applications whenever they post open jobs in the traditional venues, and social media is starting to become the new way to match employees and employees more successfully. Amidst sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter is rapidly becoming an effective way to reach out into your network to find designers, programmers, kitchen staff, gardeners, copywriters, and pretty much anything else.

Use Twitter to Water Your Plants

Interestingly, MakeZine wrote a piece about how to make your plants Tweet when they need water – while this might seem a little esoteric, it’s representative of what happens as practically everything gets an IP address and becomes connected to the network. Imagine if your home security system could tweet a break-in or your car tweeted a schedule service request: essentially, anything that can’t communicate that needs regular attention could tweet for your attention.

Use Twitter to Write a Book

If the average book is 80,000 words with around 5 letters per word, it could take nearly 3,000 Tweets to reach the end. In 2008, 5 of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cellphone novels, built by one or many writers 140 characters at a time. Now there are over 1,000,000 cellphone novels so the Tweetbook shouldn’t be far behind.

James Beswick is the founder of One Uproar and the author of Getting Productive With Google Apps and The 50 Fastest Ways to Great SEO, neither of which are tweetable.

I was researching a particular topic the other day and found myself going to Twitter, using certain keywords with hash tags and ultimately finding a vast and rich amount of data. I use Google Alerts, RSS feeds and what now seems old-school, bookmarks of my favorite marketing industry and news websites to research and find products and information that is relevant to me. I am just like the customer that brands now have to reach:

I want my information now.  I can’t wait. I’m too busy.  My business and personal email inbox are always overflowing.

With the surge in social tools and the adoption of technology, brands do have to fulfill that need to get the information now—nobody wants to wait.  Allen Adamson’s article in Forbes, “CMOs: Your Brand is on Digital Time” really hits this point home.

According to Adamson: “Consumers are conditioned to get what they want when they want it.” I agree with Allen that all this access to information and the need to have it all right now is not particularly healthy. Even as much as I want to have the information “now” I find myself going through times of what I call “no tech” where my cell phone and laptop take a break.

What are you doing with your brand to be as “digital” as possible and reach customers now?

It’s easier for larger brands to dive into digital in a big way because they do have deeper pockets allowing investment in interactive tools, teams devoted to social and the ability to develop highly customized digital incentives which ultimately can provide faster traction to their product and services. I don’t think smaller to medium size companies need to despair just because their marketing budgets are smaller. There are many ways to strategize and deepen your digital presence without a heavy spend.

*Website – Take a look at your website.  Here are a few items to consider:

• Are you engaging with visitors? Is there a way for clients and prospects to “ask your company a question?”
• Have you looked at usability, in terms, of keeping visitors on your website?
• What’s a typical path of navigation for a visitor to your site?

Don’t get caught up in completely changing your existing website. If your current website isn’t engaging and your plan for 2010 does not include enhancing your website then consider other ways to reach clients online.

*Competitors – It’s always good to keep abreast of what your competition is doing. Spend time researching what your top competitors are doing in the digital world. If you find their presence to be light, that’s great news for you!  Get your company going so, you lead the way.

*Social Tools – I’ve written a few past blogs about social. Social is not for every business, so make sure you think about your strategy, your plan and budget for 2010.  If you do decide to potentially try social make sure the method or platform you choose matches your business model and customer audience.

For example, if you’re a B2C targeting a demographic of 25-30 then Twitter is probably a good way for you to reach that audience. But if your demographic is affluent, wealthy individuals between the ages of 45-55 you might want to think about other forms of social to reach them. Your industry is very much an influencer here. Do your research. Find out how your target audience is communicating and how you can reach them in the most effective way possible.

*Landing Pages – Micro sites or landing pages are an in-expensive way to target your audience and be very specific about the information your providing.

*Content – Do you have a company blog? Are you providing your clients and prospects with valuable content and information? Remember content is king now so if you can, I highly suggest starting a company blog.

*Incentives – What can you do to provide online incentives to your client base? Even if you’re a B2B business there are ways to provide free consultations, online methods that “hook” potential clients and push them further up the sales funnel.

Brands and marketers have to be online in ways like never before. Social does provide tools that reach millions of people in ways we could not achieve through website and other DM methods.  There are so many ways to go “digital”.  I’ve only scratched the surface here. Digital is exciting and fun: think about what you can do this year to be more online with your existing client base and potential customers.

Here are 10 major reasons.

1. Your keywords are wrong.

One of the trickiest parts of creating websites isn’t technical – it’s keyword research. There’s little point to creating a slick, professional site if it’s built around keywords that have little traffic or are too broad to compete with established sites. There’s no magic formula for finding the right keyword phrases, but there are some great tools that help narrow them down and give you the best chance for success.

For example, if you are a veterinarian in New York, you would struggle to gain first-page placement for the phrase “vet New York”. But if you determined that the most popular breed of dog among your clients was a Maltese, or a certain medical procedure was common for a particular animal, using these in your keyword mix would make it easy to reach the first page.

Specific, popular phrases that reflect your specialties are essential to finding quality traffic.

2. Your website is SEO-unfriendly.

It’s remarkable how many $50,000 sites developed by web professionals have practically non-existent SEO features. By “SEO-unfriendly”, I’m referring to the overuse of Flash, too much Ajax, poor and inconsistent navigation, missing title and description metatags, missing ALT text, bad URLs, cloaking links in JavaScript and so forth. To do SEO well, it needs to be designed in from the beginning, and just because a site may look good in a browser window to a human doesn’t mean it will rank well in search engines.

If you have the opportunity to build from scratch, call the SEO experts at the same time as the design experts, since retrofitting the site later will be considerably more difficult.

3. There’s little or no content.

The days of having a website consisting of 5 pages, 500 words and a handful of pictures are over – sites like these are impossible in the SEO business, simply because there’s nothing there for a search engine (or visitor). Your site is much more than a marketing leaflet moved online, and you need to have regularly-refreshed content to make visitors feel there’s value.

“What could I possibly write about?” is a question I get asked all the time by customers, but it’s surprisingly easy to develop a program for building articles to attract visitors. While you can hire a web-copy professional easily, it’s generally better to develop in-house because you understand your business better than anyone else, and your voice is important in creating an authentic online presence.

If you’re stumped for ideas, think about what advice you give people at social events that has the most positive reaction – everyone has a point-of-view on their field of expertise that has value.  While a plumber may not think that plunging a garbage disposal is complicated or worth writing about, somebody Googling to plunge a blocked garbage disposal will find the content invaluable.

4. You have duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a real problem – both when it happens intentionally and unintentionally. Google’s concept of “duplicate content” doesn’t mean a word-for-word copy – it means “substantially the same”, so changing a few words doesn’t solve the problem. There are several areas that hurt websites, often without their knowledge:

• Several URLs resolve to the same page – such as http://www.mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com/index.html and https://mycompany.com. Unwittingly, if you don’t define canonical names and redirects properly, your SEO suffers.
• You use product descriptions from manufacturers: cutting and pasting their descriptions causes the same problem, since other vendors do exactly the same thing.
• You have a review site for products based upon user-generated content (UGC) and your members cross-post to similar sites.
• Spam-bots steal your site’s page content and replicate it on another site with ads – there are tools to help locate these, and .htaccess methods to help block the problem (stopping this illegal copying once it’s happened is not easy, however).
• You use session IDs extensively, which create many multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

5. You may be over-optimizing your pages.

Personally, I believe that ‘keyword density’ is overdone as an SEO topic: the concept of repeating phrases to account for 3-5% of web-copy has been touted as a science and there’s very little to prove it (see how IMDB and Amazon and almost every major site all rank highly without doing this). Unfortunately, there’s also a belief that more is better, so webcopy develops into:

John Smith Sports Shoes and Clothing prides itself on supplying Sports Shoes and Clothing to the Midwest made exclusively by John Smith and his Sports Shoes and Clothing team. Do you need Sports Shoes and Clothing? If so, you’ll love our Sports Shoes and Clothing, made by……

6. Nobody links to you.

Inbound links – those where other people point to your site’s page – are the number one determinant in your site’s relevance and ranking. Inbound links are effectively votes for the quality of your site.  Designing a great site is only the start, and you need to find other sites that will refer you, such as:

• Trade associations, industry partners, vendors, customers and other firms you naturally deal with.
• Review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, etc.)
• Bloggers and content sites (such as About.com).
• Government and educational sites, where possible, due to the disproportionate influence their

Link farms and other fake mechanisms should be avoided: these will hurt your SEO. Inbound links from quality sites share part of their PageRank (relevance) with you, whereas thousands of links from link farms detract from your score.

7. You’re not promoting your site.

Unlike in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won’t come – at least not if you don’t tell them. A poorly-promoted site is like a store with no exterior signage, and you need to use every available channel to funnel visitors towards you:

• Use offline methods: is your site on your invoices, brochures, business cards, POS receipts and flyers?
• Are you using social media to direct customers who might be looking for your services?
• Are you looking at how your competitors get traffic and where they are prominent online?
• Are you using search engine marketing – Google, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon, Facebook and affiliate programs?

8. You’re being unrealistic.

Just as we don’t all grow up to be astronauts, so too not all sites can be a runaway viral success. The truth is that a good portion of businesses lack the sexiness that allows their elevation to Digg superstardom. You can do everything ‘right’ and still find traffic is slow – it does happen, and that’s ok, as long as you still receive quality traffic. While the market for pet taxidermy may be very small, an well-optimized site will still attract visitors that are really interested in the subject, and will have a great conversion rate.

9. You’re a spammer.

But you’re not, are you? You might find that you are, because you could be using a cheap hosting solution with shared IPs that are abused by other customers, or you bought a really great domain name that came with historical baggage you weren’t aware of. There are plenty of ways that legitimate sites can be caught in the spam net, and it’s a good idea to check this out.

There are ways to get around these problems: find a quality host, change your domain name or alert the search engines to a change of ownership. But it’s surprising how many times this is a problem for sites that never engage in anything particularly questionable.

10. You paid $99 to get a guaranteed #1 Google listing.

The Internet is the Wild West for SEO – and everything else – and if it sounds too good to be true, I guarantee you it is. Whereas most often you will simply lose your $99, some companies engage in blackhat SEO, which means using unscrupulous methods to improve rankings. Many of these work wonders in the short term, resulting in a near-overnight domination of the engines, but you will always – always – get caught out in the end.

The problem with this is that once you get blacklisted for taking advantage of Google (which is obviously against their Terms of Service), Google can and will punish your site by denying a listing for months, years and maybe forever. Blackhat SEO is an extremely poor strategy given the growing sophistication of their algorithm.

The truth is that good SEO is a long, hard and complicated process that stops all your competitors from doing exactly the same thing – if you work hard at it, you can reach page one for your chosen topics. Ultimately, your success on the engines will reflect your success with visitors, and there aren’t any one-stop shortcuts.

James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and loves everything to do with SEO, SEM and SMO.