How People are Using Twitter for Internet Marketing

Twitter can be a great way to get your message out and keep your cusomers updated with news about your website and business in general. Twitter is useful for a certain type of customer and certain type of business and will not always be suitable for all businesses. Generally to make use of Twitter you have to be a socially active person and try to be part of the online community - get people to follow you and make use of the products and services offered by other Twitter users. You will find yourself part of a clique where it is fashionable to purchase products from other social network users

 Using Twitter just to advertise and push content to other people who are following you is not really effective. You will not make any online friends if you simply try to sell them stuff. The chances of getting a direct sale in this way is really close to zero. On the other hand if you are a well respected online contributor and make friends online there is a great opportunity to use Twitter to draw attention to your website and article postings online.

It is easy to get started with Twitter. First you can go to Twitter.com and sign up for a free twitter account. You verify your email address and then you are good to go. I would suggest going to profile and add your location to your tweets. You can then start searching for twitter users in the niches you are interested in. Follow other users and if they like your profile they may follow you back. In many cases about 10-15% of people you follow will follow you back.

When you start posting on Twitter do not just start posting ads. Try making some friends, comment and re-tweet their postings and become part of this micro-blogging community. By all means when you publish an article on your website you can of course tweet the link but do not over-do it. Do not get a reputation as a Twitter spammer. You will lose your followers, discredit your company and your products and may even get your Twitter account suspended.

You can use Twitter as a platform for offering sales and discounts and other promotions to your followers. Twitter users like this and appreciate this gesture.  In your twitter profile you can put a link to your website and other Twitter users can see this, so by contributing online you can actually drive viewers to your website indirectly so you may not need to keep advertising your site in your postings.

Google is always watching Twitter posts and can see if your website is being referred to in online discussion. If people are often posting links to your website that will help you greatly with the SEO and your Google position. On the other hand if you are constantly posting your own link that carries less weight with Google. It is a bit like the difference between you telling everyone how great your website is, and a number of other people telling others your website is good. Who would you listen to?

Successful SEO Campaigns

Successful SEO campaigns are started with a simple look at how your website is setup. A common mistake is focusing too highly on making a website look good for customers but neglecting the way that site will look to the search engines. A common mistake is using Flash animations, or making the whole website in Flash! Using Flash for the whole website is a huge mistake. You have no content on the pages for Google to read and understand. Google will not understand the Shockwave file and will have no idea what your website is about.

As a webmaster you should ensure that your website has a Robots.txt file. A Robots.txt file is used to tell search engines to ignore certain parts of your website. You may wish to prevent images folders and other areas of the website from being spidered by the search engines. This is useful to  channel the spider towards the important content on your website and it will get it indexed more quickly. You can also use this method to divert pagerank juice away from the pages you dont need to be indexed giving your main pages more "Juice" and higher Google rankings.

Another important aspect for SEO is to ensure that you have a correct keyword density on your website. Keyword density is the percentage of page content that is your keyword phrase. You should aim for 4%. More than that could be considered spammy, especially for Google.  Less than that you may have an off-topic webpage and may not rank so well for the keywords you are aiming for. You can make use of the strong html tag to emphasize the main keywords - but do not overdo this.

To get a good Google ranking you need to have a few directory listings. Make sure you submit your site to DMOZ and other popular directories. There are many directories out there and most are of a low quality so you can avoid those.

You need to have an active website to get good rankings. You should refer to your website in online discussions, Twitter, Facebook and try to get some links off other websites in your field. This will help you immensely with getting a higher up listing in the search. Do not go overboard on this and get hundreds of low quality links which will not really get you good listings.

You can try Google Adwords you pay Google for a spot in the Google search. The more you pay the higher up in the search your website will be. This can be expensive so choose your keywords carefully. You can make use of the most specific keywords only. Longer phrases (three words and more) are usually cheaper to bid on so you might want to focus on those.