• Communicate with customers.
• Increase brand exposure.
• Boost website traffic.
• Increase SEO effectiveness.
• Generating exposure for the business.
• Building new business-to-business partnerships.

Using social media as a marketing tool can be confusing, not to mention time consuming.  For most of us, social media is simply a way to track high school friends and be jealous of their vacations.  Those who have watched this medium develop from its beginnings are in better tune with it.

As social media platforms become more popular with businesses, getting a head of trends will be increasingly important.  The best two places to break the ice is to create your own social profile (your personal one–not for your business) on Facebook and Twitter.  Get to know how each works, what the social etiquette is on each one and then you’ll begin to see how it will work for your business.

Both are easy to learn and use. But, there are always professionals who can help. If you’re interested in Social Media Advertising, please feel free to contact PTS Multimedia for more information.

Corporate 480.656.7235; Hawaii 808.543.1137

1. Sign in to your Google account and then head to http://www.google.com/+/business/.
2. You now have to select which category your business fits into. The categories are as follows: 

• Local Business or Place – Suitable for: hotels, restaurants, places, stores, services.

• Product or Brand – Suitable for: apparel, cars, electronics, financial services.

1. Enter your business name and website.

• Select an additional category that suits your business. These sub-categories are dependent on the main category you choose. For example, for “product or brand” you can choose from the likes of food and drink, arts and entertainment, fashion and beauty, home and garden, etc. (If you thought Twitter’s bio space was tight, Google+ is even tighter. You have just 10 words to summarize your business.)

Black Hat SEO Techniques

1. Keyword Stuffing: This becomes the case when there is basically a long list of keywords and phrases within your site that are not relevant to your website. These would be located in the backend code of the website. For example: Your website mainly consists of selling auto parts online. In this case “auto parts” would be a good keyword to use, but in a black hat technique, the site would contain keywords such as: “oil change, shop for brakes, tires for sale, auto repair shop, etc.” Granted these keywords have to do with autos, but they are not relevant to selling auto parts online because these services aren’t actually offered.
2. Hidden Content: Hidden content is content that is invisible to the user in the backend code of the website. This hidden content will be content that is stuffed with keywords. Examples of this include: comment tags, <noscript> tags, and <noframes> tag. These backend codes are used to attract for search engine crawlers, but it is not a good way to attract them.
3. Meta Tag Stuffing: This occurs when there are keywords stuffed into the meta description, meta titles, and meta keywords. This is not what these are used for.
4. Doorway Pages: To define a doorway page it is basically a fake page that a person will never see. These are strictly created for specific search engines to crawl, and to trick the search engine into ranking that site higher. These pages are considered spam, and once caught onto, that site will be penalized in the long term.
5. Link Farming: This is a black hat SEO technique that consists of exchanging links with websites that are not relevant to your website. Basically, just getting links out there to increase the amount of sites that are linking back to your website to boost your link popularity and Google Page Rank. A link farm is also known as a page that exists on your website that contains a list of links that are not relevant to your website.

White Hat SEO Techniques

1. Internal Linking: Using keywords in the content of your website that link to other pages of your website is a great way for search engines to crawl those keywords. This also helps you to rank for those keywords organically.
2. Content Creation: Creating quality and unique content is a great way to reach out to other websites, and a great way to get links back to your website. Having quality content throughout your website is also very important because search engines love to crawl content in order for them to rank your website accordingly.
3. Keyword Research: Researching the right keywords with high search volume is a must in any successful SEO campaign. The more specific the keywords, the better. They need to be long-tail phrases that specifically describe your company. These keywords will receive the best click-through-rate for your business. These keywords and phrases should be written within your content to an extent, not to the point where they are stuffed in the content multiple times.
4. Meta Tags: Using the description tag to thoroughly describe your web page should include one or two keywords maximum in that description. Using the title tag to thoroughly describe your web page using one keyword and a small description of that web page. Implementing keywords and descriptions of each picture on your website known as Alt tags. Lastly, the thorough use of H1, H2, and H3 tags will help boost your rankings as well.
5. Site Structure: The overall structure of your website should be SEO friendly. This includes the use of all the areas above covered. Good internal linking, content, keyword research, SEO friendly URLs, and backend coding is the guide to a great SEO friendly website.
6. Relevant Inbound Links: Having backlinks that are relevant to website, and having high link popularity is the goal for a good backlink. A bad link would be considered a link from a website that is not relevant to your website in any way. Relevancy is key!

If you’re concerned that your current SEO company is doing black hat techniques, give PTS Multimedia a call, and we can help you design a white hat SEO campaign to ensure better rankings in the long term. 480-656-7235

1) It is a fraction of the cost of print advertising.

2) Allows you to connect with you customers even when your doors close. Although your business may only be open from 9 to 5 that does not mean you can’t still engage with your customers or promote information about up and coming events, products and services even after your doors close.

3) With print advertising once your ad goes to print that is it. Social Media marketing on the other hand allows your promotions to evolve and change on a day to day basis.

4) Allows you as a business owner to see what is working and what is not. Feedback is encouraged on social media channels allowing you to see what your web audience relates too.

5) Allows you to seek out potential new customers based on what has already been established as your current demographic.

6) Helps you to appear higher within Google. This means when someone is looking for a business in your area you have a better chance of that person clicking on your information. Social Media is now officially factored into Google’s algorithm.

7) Permits you to follow your competition. With Social Media marketing you can see what offers your competition is putting on the table to succeed.

(8) Social Media gets your message out faster and to more people. Social Media enables more rapid sharing of information. It may take hours, or even days, for a new announcement to reach the end consumer through traditional channels but with Social Media it is a matter of seconds.

9) Social Media Marketing uses tools such as blogs to increase awareness and image. Blogging can help “spread the word” about a company, its products, and its services to more people, dramatically increasing brand recognition, and awareness.

10) Can help create a list of loyal followers. These followers will keep bringing your company business and referring it to others if they are pleased with what they are finding on your social media channels.

If you are looking to use social media as a way to bring in business, please give us a call today. Our account managers will help your business succeed by strengthening relationships with existing clientele, driving people to your website, and putting fresh educational content on your social media channels. So although social media is not brain surgery it is time consuming. Please give us a call today for a free competitive analysis.

By, Andrew J. Shainker

Andrew@ptsmultimedia.com

480-656-7235

Points to consider while designing a website layout
Website design is not a one time activity. Almost all websites alter their layouts to give it a new and better look. Also with advancement in technology, underlying code also changes accordingly, adding new possibilities of providing a better layout.

Keep it simple:  A simple website layout is user friendly. Do not create complex navigational links using complex scripts or images that maynot be viewable correctly in different browsers. Also search engines cannot index the site properly if complex navigation is involved. Minimize the use of bulky images which take long to load. Use smaller icons to attract visitor’s attention instead.

Readable font size and face:  Use a standard font size of “-1″ (11 or 12 pixels if using styles) so that visitors can read the content easily. Select a professional looking font face (Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif are very common). Avoid using fancy fonts like Comic Sans (unless it is a personal website). Use appropriate spacing between lines (12 or more pixels) to avoid clumsiness.

Use web safe eye pleasing colors: The choice of colors may reflect one’s personal taste. Every webmaster or designer wants the color combination that he/she likes best. However, it is a wise decision to get feedback from users or friends about what they feel about the color combination of the website. Use web safe colors whenever possible.

Webpage Dimensions: One important aspect of layout is keeping track of dimensions of a web page. Most successful commercial websites limit the width and height of the webpage so that the important content of the webpage lies within the top 600×600 viewable area without scrolling. To avoid a horizontal scrollbar, set the page layout to expand and shrink with changes in browser window size. Sometimes this interferes with image and text positions relative to each other and throws the layout structure out of sync. The best choice is to limit the width by placing a table with a fixed width of 750 or 775 pixels. See the layout of this web page for an example.

The page height should not be any more than 4 scroll lengths. Limit the content of the page and if more content needs to be added, move it to a new web page. Provide a navigational link to the next page and a link back from the second page. This will also increase your web site’s page views (adding more advertising space).

Limit File Size: Webpage size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including javascript, flash etc.) that is downloaded from the server to view a webpage. Page size is very critical for high volume websites because of high bandwidth needed. However, it is also very important for any other site in order to keep loading times to a minimum. Most of the population on the internet use a slow 56K modem to access the internet. And smaller page sizes load faster. If you look at some very high volume websites like Yahoo.com and Google.com, they hardly have any images, making their site load faster.

There is a trade off between making your webpage look nicer with lots of graphics and making it faster to load. The rough target for page size should be below 35K for at least the cover page. However, for e-commerce sites, it is often not possible because they have to present multiple product images to attract attention. As a general rule of thumb, a visitor will leave your site if the loading time is more than 8 secs.