As online marketing terms and phrases go, “synergy” is probably one of the most overused. In fact, those of us in the industry hear it so much that sometimes tends to lose its meaning.

Despite that fact, however, it really is the best word to describe what usually happens when social network marketing starts to work. It’s never easy to pinpoint any one tactic or moment; rather, you suddenly find that clusters of new clients and colleagues start coming at you from all angles. What seems to be a useless exercise just a few weeks or months ago suddenly starts yielding monstrous results. You reach a “tipping point” where all of your efforts start to pay off.

How long it takes to reach this point depends largely on you, your business, and what kind of time and effort you put into social network marketing. The easiest way to speed things up, though, is by using all of your tools in concert. In other words, never rely only on Facebook to generate leads, or Twitter to get your message out – instead, be sure that each profile is linked to the others, with a consistent message coming through every blog post, social update, or video you put out into the virtual world.

Additionally, don’t just limit your efforts to what’s online, or even considered “social media.” There’s no reason your print ads can’t mention your Facebook fan page; likewise, Twitter can be a great avenue for broadcasting the sale you’ll be having at your physical retail location in a couple of weeks. Naturally, as we’ve mentioned all along, you’ll want to keep these outright promotions relatively rare when working on social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon them altogether.

Just as you would want the sales and marketing divisions of your company working closely together, so too should your social networking profiles be building on top of each other in your other online and off-line promotional efforts. Take a step back once in a while and check whether all the parts of your marketing advertising are moving in the same direction; synergy might get talked about too much, but that’s only because it’s so beautiful when it happens.

I was reading an article today on Search Marketing Standard, by Chris Stiner regarding web design site restructure, who gives some very relevant information on the steps to take to proper optimization when re-designing or structuring a Web site. In fact, we often try to explain this process to our clients but frankly, I think Chris says it best here so I might as well save my breath. Thanks Chris!

The challenges of restructuring a site that has been optimized for SEO are major. If you are going to make fundamental changes to the look, flow, and — most importantly — content of your site, here are three important steps you should follow if you want to maintain your positive rankings in the SERP s.

1. Create a one-to-one 301 redirect map of pages from the old site to the new site. Make sure the pages are as close to an exact match as possible.
2. Make sure that any old site pages that do not have an exact corresponding new site page are redirected at a category level.
3. Any old site pages left that still do not have a home should be redirected to the new site home page.

The reasons for doing this are plenty. Your website is full of assets that you need to protect. Here are the top three things you want to maintain during and after a restructure of your site.

1. External links to your website. People who follow these links need to land on relevant pages. If you lose the relevancy of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, you lose most of its value. More importantly, you want the search engines to map the links correctly.
2. Deep link pages of your site in the SERPs. When users click on them, you will want the correct pages to show up. This mirrors point #1, but from the user’s perspective via the search engine.
3. Bookmarks of your site. When a user attempts to go to a bookmark, you want to make sure they get the information they are looking for. Again, relevancy is king.

If you have a large site (over 100 pages or so) here are three techniques to help you prioritize your pages to ensure you are taking care of the most important content first.

1. Identify which pages are receiving the most traffic. Your analytics software will help you here.
2. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify your external links and what pages they are landing on.
3. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to locate the top pages listed by your external links. Yahoo lists this in order of importance most of the time.

By taking a serious look at your site structure and not skimping on the upfront work of site mapping and 301 redirects, you can eliminate most of the headaches that can come as a result of a poorly planned SEO restructuring.

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is commonplace for most pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. The idea of testing two different ad copies or landing pages is nothing new, but I bet there are many advertisers that could dive a little deeper when it comes to split testing and discover a new level of clarity for their PPC campaigns.

First, here is a quick definition of split testing as regards PPC. With split testing, two or more items are tested side by side to determine which performs better at a specific metric. The importance of testing is critical to optimization. If you don’t test, you cannot improve your campaign. It is as simple as that. Most advertisers will find that the first couple of tests will have the most dramatic results, but it is important to continue testing various elements of your campaign at all times.

So what can you test when it comes to PPC? The most prominent thing to test is ad copy. Testing multiple ads for every keyword you are bidding on is essential to PPC success. Testing new headlines, description lines, display URLs, and destination URLs are all important areas to test when it comes to ad copy split testing. The idea of testing multiple ad copy translates very well to the content network also. Rich media campaigns are probably on the forefront of split testing and, if they are a component of your PPC campaign, you need to make sure to test new creative all the time.

On ad copy level, split testing should run for a minimum of one week, but running for one month is ideal. Every day has different characteristics, and each week has variances (think about pay weeks). Ads should attain a minimum of 300 clicks, but 1,000 is ideal. You need to allow for enough data to accumulate for each ad before making any decisions regarding how effective it is. You also want to let every ad gather at least 15 conversions. Each advertiser will have a different set of results. This is simply a rough guideline.

Landing page testing is another very important aspect to test when it comes to any online marketing campaign, PPC included. Testing new layouts, copy, fonts, colors, forms, and shopping carts are just a few things to consider when split testing your landing pages. Knowing how much weight your landing page has in regards to quality score and conversion rates, you should spend ample time testing out countless versions throughout your SEO campaigns.

A few other thing you should make sure to split test are: match type, ad position, max CPC, time of day, day of week, and month of year. Look at it this way, anything you have an option for should be tested. This also applies to testing elements. Click-through rate, conversion rate, total conversions, cost per conversion, page views per click, cost per click, and total cost are just a few outcomes that most PPC campaigns test.

Make sure you take that deep dive when it comes to split testing within your PPC campaign. It is a large ocean and even though surfing the waves may be appealing, you don’t want to miss out on what lies beneath the surface.

Chris Crum at WebProNews had an interesting blog about real-time search and how Google is incorporating Tweets into their search results. Depending on how popular you are and your activity-level on Twitter, you may or may not have some of your tweets featured in certain search results. There are many factors like how many followers you have, whether or not you use hash (#) marks in tweets, and the quality of the content you link to.

As Twitter’s popularity and relevancy grows, so does it’s relationship with Google. Whether you do or don’t think Twitter is a valid SEO Tool no longer matters, all that matters for your business is what Google thinks. Check out what Chris has to say about including Twitter in your search marketing strategy below.

It’s ok to say “no” to Twitter if that’s your thing. There’s a chance that it just doesn’t fit into your SEO strategy or help you achieve your goals. That’s cool. However, if it is your thing, you may be interested in how Google ranks tweets. That is if search marketing is your thing.

Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for “Obama,” to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the “signal in the noise,” he says. Such a “signal” might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention “Cambridge police” or “Harry Reid” near mentions of “Obama.” By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.