The Journey of a Thousand Followers Begins With A Single Reach Out

In the land of social media and web marketing the same holds true for your business marketing as what did ten years ago.  Kind of.  Instead of reaching out to mass numbers of groups of people at once, now you’re after mass numbers of individual people all at once.  Conventional marketing is overcooked, commercials are too frequent, and hidden pitches are embedded in our favorite outlets.  People rely on the opinions of people today.  Popularity among people wins today. 

When you’re ready to connect with people here is the simple formula:

Follow and friend other people like yourself.  Follow and friend potential speakers for you and/or your business.  These are people that you expect will like what you do, like what you have to say, and need what you’re offering.  The best ones are the people that share and re-tweet a lot but are not boring, fake or talk too much. 

Start by following 1,000 people one by one.  Then make it 1,500 people.   Follow people that follow you.  Be active in your network, but not over-active.   Once you reach your goal of 1,000 followers you can begin to weed out the most obnoxious people you’re following and get rid of them.  If you give an honest effort your follower numbers will increase naturally from there. 

Honestly, that’s it.   This can be done in a matter of weeks.   Some have done it in days, but keep in mind the faster you add the faster you can shrink.   In the end quality matters. 

Our company provides a service that is known in the industry as search engine optimization, search marketing or SEO for short.   Because search engines are constantly evolving, it is important to stay informed of these changes in order to modify your on site optimization and SEO strategy.   Sourceline Media has 10 years of experience analyzing search engines and applying successful strategies to achieve high rankings. One of our core websites, Resume-Resource.com gets over 10 million visitors a year which is 100% organic. This means that our traffic comes only from natural links, online directories and search engines.  None of the traffic comes from paid advertising.

So How do Search Engines Rank Websites?

There are certain basic factors that all the search engines use to help value a site and propel that site to the top of the rankings.  The major areas of search engine optimization are show in the image below.

The perfectly optimized website will have the right blend of  keyword usage with content that flows naturally.  The site will also have a lot of  back links from other web sites.  The search engine uses this information to determine which sites get ranked the highest.  The key components to SEO are:

1. Building Quality Back Links to Your Website  – The most imporant aspect of search engine rankings is to get quality web sites to link to you.  This is also the most difficult and time consuming task.  Search engines believe that when good sites link to you, your site must provide valuable content, therefore it’s trustworthy and deserves a higher ranking .  Links from quality directories, web sites in your niche and social media sites are ideal.

2. Anchor Text in Back Links – It’s not only the link that is important, but also the text inside of the link.  If you have a link like this:  www.sourcelinemedia.com – then the search engine only sees the site domain as part of its rankings.  If you use anchor text such as Website Marketing and Design then search engines will rank you higher for anyone that searches for “website marketing” or  “website design.”

3. On Page Optimization – The keywords that you have on your pages play a big role in search.  This includes keywords in titles, paragraphs and headings on a page.  There are keywords that are listed in HTML tags such as “alt” tags for images.  It’s important to optimize keywords in meta data such  titles, descriptions and keywords that are part of the page code and are not seen by the visitor.  It is critical to analyze the targeted keywords and optimize keyword usage on each page.  A high keyword density and your site gets penalized for spam.  Too few keywords and your site won’t rank high for those searches.

Of course, this is just the basics of SEO.  A detailed analysis of each site is needed to ensure you are doing everything possible to rank higher.  After a decade of successfully building high traffic websites, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t.   We still manage our high traffic sites, so we must stay informed of changes and upgrade our strategies to remain at the top.  If you need help ranking higher in search, then contact us today.

A CMS is a software package that is installed and configured on a web server and database. Using a CMS allows us to rapidly implement full feature dynamic database driven web sites.

What CMS do you use?

This depends on specific needs, but we prefer to work with open source systems, primarily WordPress and Drupal, which are highly regarded and heavily supported. These systems are truly dynamic, scalable and portable. Using an open source CMS allows us add features and designs to a web site at the beginning of the creation process or even years later. And since they are open source, new features are continuously built by the development community. These two CMS systems are well renowned and used by many popular brands:

Popular Brands that Use WordPress – Sony, Yahoo, eBay, Digg, Ford, CNN

Companies that Use Drupal – Warner Bros, Popular Science, Ubuntu

The President’s official website www.whitehouse.gov also uses Drupal.

So what are the client benefits of an open source CMS-driven web site?

It’s certainly helpful for us to be able to quickly build sites, add features and create new designs. There are numerous great benefits to clients, which include:

• Sites are heavily supported and portable. Even if you decide to change design firms, it’s not difficult to find people that can work with the popular CM systems we use.
• The core and developed modules are feature rich, which makes it much faster to build sites with any combination of features such as galleries, forums, blogs, social networks, membership management, e-commerce, advertising and so much more.
• The community is constantly developing features. If something innovative comes to the Internet in 2015, chances are you can add it to your site without a total redesign. This recently happened with emerging trends of Web 2.0, such as social networking.
• Designs are based on themes, so you can always create a new design without having to change the content and functionality of the site.
• It’s simple for users to add content, posts or media very quickly. If you know how to use Facebook or eBay, you are overqualified to create content in a CMS.