By Nicole Fletcher

It truly baffles me how even today, at the end of 2010, people are still completely blind to the wonderful world of social media and the endless list of possibilities this exciting new industry brings. I get that people ‘don’t have time to tweet‘, ‘don’t care what their sister’s friend ate for breakfast’ or simply ‘think this whole thing is just a fad’ – but everyone is on Facebook and everyone is inundated by the web daily. Why then are people so against learning about and taking advantage of all this new age of tech wonder has to offer?

I’m not one for conformity, after all, my personal blog is called Deviate From the Norm…but it seems clear to me that, unlike palazzo pants and bedazzled denim, Social Media is here to stay and some people just can’t, or won’t, accept that. People talk about the social verse like it’s some uncool food item in the nerdy kids’ lunchbox; like it’s something tacky or lame that the popular kids will soon force into extinction. I’m here to tell you, as Jacob Tyler’s new Social Media Director, it’s not. It’s here to stay and if you aren’t on it, well frankly, we’ll take off full speed into the future without you.

This new age of marketing that we are all so fortunate to be witnessing first hand, is just starting to bloom and grow. Social Media has totally redefined marketing, as your clients and customers can now take an active stance toward…or against your brand. With the billboards and television commercials of yesteryear, businesses never heard a peep from their clientele, who essentially hold the fate of their brand in their hands. Now, corporations, small businesses and public figures alike get to hear, see and feel it all. The truth might hurt…but better to hear it loud and clear in bold black and white, than not at all.

If you’re a business small or large you MUST know that you are not above this. You MUST take advantage of the marketing tools available to you for if you don’t, your competition surely will and probably already has. Most people don’t understand Twitter and I get that. I guarantee though, if you spend some time educating yourself, you’ll learn that thousands if not millions of people are already talking about exactly what you do for a living, or think about, or eat, or believe and those people should be on your radar as prospective clients and friends. The simple lesson is this: you must develop a presence for yourself..or hire someone to handle your social media for you. Most of the most modern marketing tools are available to you at no cost but your time, effort and passion. One of the most basic marketing fundamentals centers around ‘being your brand’ so if you’re not willing to give it some love, how can you possibly expect to succeed? If I haven’t convinced you on the vitality of this rapidly growing industry, here are some stats to gnaw on.

-500 million people are on Facebook
-Human beings spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month
-30+ billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month
-24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing declines in circulations- shock gasp
-There are over 200 million blogs
-More than 600 million searches take place on Twitter each month
-Lady Gaga has 7.2+ million followers on Twitter to date.

Get the point? Social Media is here to stay, so learn about it before we’re so far down the futuristic highway that there’s no hope of catching up.

By definition, search engine optimization is the process of making a site optimized for search engines. While this may seem a little bit of a simplified definition, let’s think about concepts of design and the intended audience. Would you choose English as your language for a Chinese website? What font is the right font? What colors should be used? I bet legibility, grammar, and spelling count for something, agreed?

Let’s take the ideas behind the design principles and apply them to a non-human audience, Googlebot. Googlebot, for example as one of the most important web crawlers, isn’t going to look at your photo except to see what alternate text will be provided if the image doesn’t load, and perhaps the file name, file size, and file type, which may or may not give Google any index-able material you care about having indexed.

Googlebot cares about the structure of your page in a similar way that any one of us would read a book, starting with the ISBN, then the number of pages, then by looking at the table of contents, looking up the number of illustrations and where they come from if referenced, and memorizing where all chapter titles are placed on a page. That’s how you read a book, isn’t it? SEO, in simplest terms, is making sure that your website is easy reading for Googlebot to kick back and relax with.

Wikipedia.org:

“As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”

At Jacob Tyler Creative Group, we’re also able to take a deep dive at how search engines look at your web host server setup, and how to get the most out of your configuration in terms of speed, user experience, and of course being easily found. Note: Currently, we are offering this service for LAMP systems only, but these systems constitute most of the web so, most likely, you’re in luck.

Note: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) should not be confused with Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) which has the broader scope of bringing in traffic from external sources. To cite Wikipedia.org,

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Most SEM strategies outside of SEO by nature are not concerned with either usability or with the ease of parsing through an electronic document. SEO, specifically, is not focused on external linking strategies, social networking, email campaigning, pay per click, and the many other types of online marketing. Questions like “Are you on Google Local business or not?” are irrelevant to SEO.

Stay tuned for our next Search Engine Optimization posting…

For part two, click here.

Better SEO Article 1 of 3

-jb