Keyword Proximity for SEO

For Search Engine Optimization or SEO, the proximity of your keywords a phrase is important to how you will rank in search engine results.

Keyword proximity (distance in space) refers to how close your keywords are and how they fit into the context of your writing. In general, closer keywords are better; of course they have to make sense (contextual relevance). You must avoid keyword stuffing and think about keyword order as well.

Keywords are important in all parts of your posts: titles, headers, paragraphs and page content.

Here is an example with the search “quality dog food”:

• Your dog kennel deserves our quality products and food services


• You deserve our high quality dog food in your kennel today


• This restaurant has no quality and their food isn’t fit for a dog

All of these have the key words with the exact same keyword density and they are roughly the same length. If everything else is equal a search will probably give the second one preferential search engine ranking.

Chris Randall

Constant Contact Review

Constant Contact is a top-ranked email marketing service, which has a comprehensive feature list and a great template designer area. It has top notch help center and its tutorials and helpful document creation wizards made creating a new campaign a snap.

With Constant Contact you can create your bulk emails through their service and even import your email marketing campaigns from an HTML page.

Comprehensive Feature Set

To build your email contact list you will first create a category and then populate it with your email list, which can be either manually input or imported using Excel, Outlook, Outlook Express or a comma delineated (.csv) file. You can even customize your demographics by filtering your contacts according to various attributes.

Constant Contact also has the ability to build aliases to show who the message is coming from. If you want to present the message as from the President of the company, you can place their name in the “from” field.

Constant Contact also helps you stay out of trouble and legal by managing your bounced emails and unsubscribe information and keep your customers happy with permission based campaigning.

Easy to Use

Setting up your emailing list and other features is very simple to do. The design of Constant Contact is set so that navigation is at the top of the screen and consists of seven different tabs. Just click on the appropriate tab and the program will walk you through the process. There are also some quick links so you can create your email campaign.

Email Campaigns

You can efficiently create an email using one of the templates or use your own HTML source.

Constant Contact includes a large range of professional looking templates that would suit most businesses and a very simple template editor. All the parts of the template are clearly labeled and easily modified using the “edit” button. You can import your own images and they can be moved around easily with a drag and drop feature for each section of your message.

Ample Campaign Reporting

Constant Contact provides all the basic requirements to create a comprehensive report including bounces, bounced percent, complaints, opt-outs, click-throughs, click-through percent and forwards.

Unsurpassed Help and Support:

Constant Contact includes a comprehensive support center that includes an extensive, searchable knowledgebase; a learning center with tutorials, live demos and scheduled webinars. They also have knowledgeable and helpful people if you chose to email or phone.

Summary:

You can’t go wrong with Constant Contact, the email designer is a simple, the creation process is smooth via the wizards and if you need help there are the online resources and the contact center.

Visit them online at www.constantcontact.com for more info.

What are Twitter Hashtags and how do I use them to market?

What are Twitter Hashtags: Primarily Hashtags are used with Twitter to make the keywords of your Tweets easily searchable. Hashtags can provide you with several marketing benefits:

• Increase your number of targeted followers. Targeted followers are your target market or better yet potential customers who are genuinely interested in what you are saying and not just hoping to get concurrent followership.
• People want to follow and be followed by others with the same general interests. With Twitter one of the best ways to attract followers is to follow, since most people will follow back. You need to be careful that you aren’t just following anyone though, so Hashtags allow us to target specific keywords and have the opportunity to reach our target audience who actually has need for our products or services.
• The Hashtag will make that keyword stand out in a tweet and make it easier to find. When you someone is tweeting with a keyword you are interested in, that is a good person to follow.
• It is easy to identify your keyword in Twitter using Hashtags. All you have to do is type a pound sign (#) before the word.
  • A Tweet may look like this “Today’s concert #presale passwords are posted at www.presalezone.com” Presale is my keyword and the pound sign identifies it for Twitter.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

Creating Customer Relationships with Twitter

A few tips on using twitter for your business:

Follow people who can provide you with valuable information. Don’t follow random people in hopes of reciprocity. You’ll waste valuable business time un-following all of the people who Tweet what they had for dinner.

Follow experts in your niche market to get great advice on growing your business.

If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who they follow.

Monitor your followers? You will automatically get an e-mail message when a new person becomes a follower. It’s time consuming, but a good idea to check them out. Potential customers will be able to see your followers and you won’t to maintain a professional image.

To get quality followers, you may want to post to Ezine sites which allow for easy Twitter integration.

Place twitter icons or use social bookmarking tools on your web site so your visitors can easily follow you and share your content.

When promoting a post, explain what is in it. Just linking builds skepticism and doesn’t earn follow through clicks.

Include your twitter address in your online correspondence like email.

Twitter is an interactive tool so use it to reply to your followers’ questions. This helps build strong relationships with your customers who get to know like and trust you. If your customers trust you they are more likely to listen to your product recommendations.

Don’t spam your customers.

Create relationships by providing sound advice. This will earn trust

Tweet about other people’s stuff. It improves your image.

Ask questions. Get opinions.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

Facebook’s Big Privacy Changes

Facebook’s rapid growth to 350 million users has prompted it to make more changes to how its users control their privacy. In a post on the company’s blog, Facebook’s privacy product manager Ruchi Sanghvi explains that everyone will need to review and update their privacy settings. This will be a popup window that will come on when you log in to Facebook and force you to make some vital privacy decisions before continuing.

The social networking giant is touting these changes as simplifying its settings. It is apparent though that they are promoting for users to use their recommended settings, since you still have to go into your privacy controls afterwards to make any changes other than what they recommend. Members can still share their content with only friends, friends of friends, everyone or make customs lists. Facebook is also giving users the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content they create or upload. You can still limit who sees tagged embarrassing photos, for example. You can also limit your picture albums individually now.

Facebook has posted this new privacy video explaining how the new system works and making suggestions for your privacy settings. It is important to note that if you want anything other than your old settings or those that are recommended by Facebook you will still need to go to your privacy setting tab to ensure you are achieving an acceptable level of privacy.

As Facebook’s recommendations tend to the liberal side of information sharing, I would recommend that you check your individual setting after you have gone through the new automatic system. Considering that Google’s will be searching Facebook pages, you may not want everyone having access to all of your information. Once it is out there, you can’t bring it back.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director