Before you take the jump into the social media ocean, you may want to take a day and decide if your customers are even using social media.  My guess is that they are, but hey, what do I know.

Here are a few ways that you can go about checking (spying) on your customers to see what they are up to in the social media arena.

• Create a new Gmail Account (don’t use an existing one).
• Create a .csv file of your customer email list and upload in to this new Gmail Account.
• Create a new account on Twitter using your special new Gmail email.  On the “Find Friends” step of the Twitter signup process, select Gmail.  PRESTO CHANGO! – Twitter automically looks at your email account and tells you which of these have twitter accounts.  You simply follow them.
• NEXT setup a Facebook account using your Gmail address. On the “Find Friends” step of the Twitter signup process, select Gmail.  PRESTO CHANGO! – One click later and you can friend all of them at one time.

3. There are a few companies that will do this sort of work for you and are very affordable.  Flowtown is my favorite “spy” network.  You upload your customer email list and they give you tons of useful information back, including what social networks your customers are using.

There are probably three or four other things you could do to get this information, but I think these are the easiest.  Once you have made the decision that, indeed your customers are like the rest of the world and using social media, then you need to get a plan for how your company should use these technologies.  SocialOXY has lots of experience in converting social media fan bases into customers.  Give us a call if you need some guidance. 1-866-907-7393

• Copyscape – is a free website that can be used to check for duplicated content across the Google index.
• Doc Cop is a registration required version that uses all three major engines.  Although not as reliable as Copyscape, we still use it to check for duplication on our client’s websites.
• Plagiarism Detect is another good but under utilized tool based on the Google index.  We use it only as a secondary check for pages that come up in Copyscape.

For clients that are using our full SEO package, we have added a digital fingerprint service that checks all content that you add to your site monthly to detect any content duplication and thieves.  Check with us to get your site evaluated today!

The parts to this equation are quite simple:

1. Search volume for the Keyword in question
2. The Click-through Rate (CTR) from the SERPs
3. Your Site conversion rate
4. Average customer value or average order value

If you know these values, you can determine if your SEO Online Marketing efforts are making you money or loosing you money.

Search Volume
Use a tool like Google’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker to pull in the volume of the keyword.

CTR from SERP
An AOL study cited average click-through rates for the first page as follows:
Page 1 Position 1 – 42% CTR
Page 1 Position 2 – 12% CTR
Page 1 Position 3 – 8.5% CTR
Page 1 Position 4 – 6% CTR
Page 1 Position 5 – 5% CTR
Page 1 Position 6 – 4% CTR
Page 1 Position 7 – 3.5% CTR
Page 1 Position 8 – 3% CTR
Page 1 Position 9 – 3% CTR
Page 1 Position 10 – 3% CTR

Your Site Conversion Rate
Simply put, the ratio of visitors to visitor that produce a goal (purchased, clicked something, signed up for newsletter, etc.) expressed as a percentage.

Average customer value or average order value
This is your average order price.  Total order value divided by total number of orders.

The Caluated ROI

Let’s say we have a keyword with the search volume of 100,000. Let’s say we are currently in the 7th position, which get 3.5% of the traffic.  Our website converts these visitors at 3%, and an average order value of $40. The equation is below:

100,000 x .035 x .03 x $40 = $4,200/mo

If you could change your position to the 3^rd on page 1?  You could increase your gross revenue by more than a factor two ($10,200.00/month).  That type of potential is so high you can not ignore it.  Let SocialOXY help you design a SEO marketing plan that fits your budget and we will monitor the ROI as part of our services.

Backlinks (or back-links [UK]) are incoming links  to a website  or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

In Simple English

A backlink is a link from another Website pointing to your Website. Backlinks show search engines how important your site is. “Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.” – Wikipedia

The Formula

More Backlinks = Better Search Engine Ranking

Do I Need It?

Yes. It is one of the most important factors if you are going after a successful SEO.

Of course, there are even more things than this to consider when putting together a good seo campaign, but these are the basics of backlink building.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

In Simple English

Web pages appear in a Google search result because their content matches the search and they have links to them from other pages indicating their importance. Therefore, in simple terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves writing pages that use keywords, words people use in searches and securing links from other pages to show how important your page is compared to others.

The Formula

Content + Backlink = Search Engine Success

A Simple 1-2-3 Guide to Getting Better Search Results

1. Write content that uses keywords used by people who search
2. Build links to your pages to show they are important
3. Keep doing it!

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for relevant words and phrases. In many respects, it is simply quality control for websites. In a very simple way, SEO can be described as the followings,

• Creating an indexable website, which can be found by people via search engines.
• Creating content that describes your products and services using words and phrases used by your potential customers.
• Securing links from other sites to show the search engines how important your site is.

Of course, there are many other issues to think about when doing SEO, but that is the basic part of Search Engine Optimization.