If you are not pessimistic about power of social media, FB is The Right Marketing Partner for you. With some effort, your good ideas and product values, you can become a fan favourite on Facebook.  There is so much to do with Facebook and its applications.

Yet, there are people who take a shy while capitalizing on this potential media. They still believe FB is only for fun and gossips, not for serious business. However, those who had eagle’s eye and applied smart business sense are already enjoying the fruits today.

If you do not want to be called among those backbenchers, it is high time you stop repenting. Rather take a quick lesson from those who started commercialising FB years back.

If you are not convinced yet, let us show you what Facebook can do to you and your business.

Pure branding:

Facebook fan pages are the profiles for your brands. It is like having another website under the brand Facebook.com. With FB fan page, you can talk about your business and its offerings to your prospects. You can share your domain knowledge and market experience to thousands of fans and friends.

It is a human instinct that people feel comfortable interacting through an open and neutral space. Since FB is a platform that people access out of their own interest, you always get natural and targeted traffic. You can easily engage people through your marketing skills and all these come at no cost. You will not find a better medium than this if pure brand building is your primary business concern.

Better reach, real-time communication, effective marketing:

You can integrate your FB fan page to your company website and drive traffic directly to your site.  Just having a website does not ensure your target audience see it and do necessary actions. Unless world’s largest social media giant backs your business site, you will not find an easy to reach your customers. Only when right kind of audience interacts with you, know your business and relate their interests with it, your marketing effort is successful.  After all marketing involves two-way communication. A fan page allows fans to post pictures, provide product reviews, post feedbacks and comments, which in turn attracts other users.

 Did you find any such tools before that could communicate with your customers in such a friendly manner? It is simply priceless. FB fan page gives you that chance to get closer to your prospects and build healthy business relationships.  You can join conversations both within FB fan page and user’s news feed section; update fans on special events or important business news.  All these happen real –time.

Cost effective promotion:

It does not matter if your business does not have a site yet.  A well-designed and moderated FB fan page itself performs better than a website. You can integrate multiple built-in applications of Facebook at almost no cost (exceptions are there for rich feature-oriented tool).  Only hiring a good FB marketing consultant and a designer cum developer would suffice your requirement. This obviously costs lesser than running and maintaining a website. Here you just pay for the marketing effort and that is all.

SEO and real-time indexing:

This is one great thing about FB fan page. All FB page contents are indexed by Google and it happens real-time like in Twitter. Most of the SEO professionals appreciate this SEO-friendly feature of FB.

Unlimited fans:

Unlike FB profile that allows you up to 5000 friends, FB fan page lets you make unlimited number of fans.  The group itself can be unlimited and you can send across messages to 5000 of them at a time. Do you see any alternative to such a wonderful online help? You will not.

The greatest thing about Facebook fan page is that even smallest businesses can gain from it.  It takes nothing more than passion and little marketing help to reap all the social media benefits.

In recent times FB has developed a global community of shared connections and interests that knows no cultural or region specific boundary. Business owners all over the world have started counting on Facebook experts for all their FB fan page needs.

So what are you waiting for?  FB has proven its worth on web. Now it is your turn to justify its value on your behalf.

Significance of social media promotion is beyond any introduction or explanation. It has already earned the name and  fame it deserves.

Today you won’t find any advertiser who does not know how to use Facebook, Twitter or Google+ for his business promotion.  It is too simple. You create a fan page; invite friends and followers to join your community; share reviews and make business out of prospects.

Even the number of social media marketers is growing fast.  Now you don’t have to call your marketer to get SMM quotes. They will give it you in the first meet only that too at affordable price and with lots of freebies.  On the whole organizing SMM campaigns doesn’t look like a head-breaking task anymore.

However things are not as easy as it seems. Here are the facts advertisers must analyze themselves –

Get rid of myths: It is serious

One must know that creating an application-rich Facebook fan page is not a big deal. Even increasing fans and friends for the page is just a matter of time and some marketing effort. For Twitter and Google+ similar concept applies. Your social media marketer doesn’t have to slog to get the job done.

But here are a few points to consider

1. Is that good enough for the SMM service you have paid or expected?

2. Are you complacent with social media report delivered at the end of the month?

3. Do you believe collecting 1000 FB fans or 2000 Twitter followers or 3000 G+ members  in one month is  a big achievement from your business point of view?

4. Are you aware of the fans and followers who are supposed to share your business updates? Have you checked if all your followers are active in social media?

5. Have they joined you willingly or it is done forcefully?

6. Do their social profiles exist in person or it is a manipulation?

7. Even if their profiles exist do they have real interest on your business?

8. Do you think such social media promotions can bring you potential and regular customers?

If you think “Yes” you may repent sooner or later.

Know what you deserve but didn’t get yet

1. This is for the advertisers who are not aware of what quality social media promotion is. Social media marketing is not about how big social community you have developed; rather it is how active the members are in sharing your business reviews.

2. You should know who are the people talking good about your business in FB, Twitter or G+?  You deserve to view their details and know what they take interest in.

3. You need real sharing from real reviewers. No impulsion should exist in this marketing process. Else results could get diluted.

4. Every social profile should have genuine interest to share your business reviews. Only relevant and targeted users can contribute to the best of their effort. The whole social media reviewing system should work as natural as they are.

5. Getting detailed social link at the end of the month is your right. It is not the number of fans and followers you should ask your SMM manager; rather it is the direct link that social media users are sharing though their profiles.  This looks authentic and shows ingenuity. You should have the evidence that your website links are being shared.  This will bring confidence in you.

Launching Social Genie – for all your help

Well, we are here to solve your problem – not just to discuss about it.

Softz Solutions, after a number of successful initiatives since 2002, is coming up with something new.  This time “We are Going Social – beyond Search Engine Marketing“.

Our recent launch for the New Year 2012 is Socialgenie.net – “Genie’s Magic Wand Is At Work Again “

This for our esteemed clients who want to develop social media links for their campaigns.

How Social Genie is going to work for advertisers?

1. First we will ask your social media marketing requirements. This includes campaign duration, preferred social media (among FB, twitter and G+), number of social media links required in a month and the web pages you want to promote.

2. Next we will create engaging marketing contents for each of your campaigns. This content is basically the reviews that social media users registered with Social Genie will share through their profiles.

3. Our SMM managers will keep a track of each review sharing time to time. Since reviewers will take part in this system out of their own interest, quality and relevancy will never be an issue. This is by default.

4. Our QC team is going to evaluate the link development process periodically.

5. At the end of the month we will collect unique social links against each campaign and send them for final verification.

6. Your social link report is ready to deliver. Just click on any link and check who has shared your social media reviews. It is so quick and transparent. You can verify all the social links generated through Facebook, Twitter and Google +.

To know more about Social Genie click here. You can also fill up “Advertiser Sign Up” form on main page and send your SMM requirements. We will revert back to you with pricing.

Hope to see you soon rocking at Socialgenie.net

The journey never kept quiet:

Though started as another SEO service provider long back in 2002, we never stopped learning new ways to grow. It is a quest to earn respect, to inculcate advanced techniques and to cross our boundaries – that built us what we are today. It took us through a series of tests, observations, changes and improvements before we claim ourselves “a trusted SEO partner”.  And truly the journey still continues.

Self-analysis makes us stronger:

While trying to recollect the moments of our success we went where we started from.  We analyzed our business strategies, our client relationship models and our core competencies. There were several introspections on what and how our clients think of us and how good we have been able to meet their expectations.  We also considered our business expansion models and then worked out what brought us repeat business over and over.

Indeed we discovered the driver of our growth. It is our coherent business principles that did the tricks. We still count on it and would like to upgrade with times.

The principles we always obeyed like orders are:

1. Grow as you are always small – We maintained a fair distance between What To Be and what We Are. This helped us burn mid night’s oil. We never boast of what we did, rather we take credits as a challenge to do better.

2. Aim big but never belittles others – We had a high hope to be the domain leader and do everything for our esteemed client’s.  We did it and still living the flow. We always valued our competitors and their strategies.  But at the same time we tried to deliver something extra that our competitors are not aware of or not serious about. The prime focus was to have delighted customers than just satisfied ones.

3. Learn from other’s mistakes, not necessarily yours – We believe mistakes are done to avoid it. It is common to all. However we make sure common mistakes that our competitors are doing out of ignorance are not repeated. That is why we had to keep ourselves abreast of every consequence.

4. Move fast but steadily – It is not that hundreds of clients choose us in a single day. We toiled for it day in day out and earned the appreciations we deserved.  For us consistency and firm determination was the priority and it just gets better with time.

5. Invest in R&D – Other than doing client’s projects we had been working on hundreds of internal assignments. As on date we have around 400 blogs, sites, and directories in almost every theme one can think of. Our biggest success is MyPrivateTutor.com and its subsidiaries in 7 countries. We are also coming up with a new social media program for our existing partners- socialgenie.com. We keep experimenting on our internal sites and find out the best strategy that would work wonders. Thus any new strategy or action we need to apply for our client campaigns is full-proof and tested. Our SEO plans are almost error-free.

Hope we will live them altogether forever.

The mantra is – we would awaken so that our clients can rest in peace. That is the vision we have like others do. But for us vision is a collective of daily missions.  At the end of the day we want to feel good for what we do and how we do.

It is our pleasure and pride that we are accountable for everything we try out.

Want to know us better? See what these people have to say about us.

Well that is from a blogger’s point in view.

1. What is about advertisers who are pouring money into SEO job month after month?

2. Are they aware of possible advertising opportunities a blog can provide?

3. Do advertisers know the demand of contextual links replacing typical link-building process?

4. Do they consider blog marketing as a major part of social media promotion?

A lot has changed in monthly link scope as search engines have shifted their attention to updated and interactive pages. Now blog has turned into a good resource to collect quality backlinks. And to none of our ignorance typical link-building process is taking back stage.

Here are some questions for advertisers:

• How do you market your business website through guest blog posting?
• How do you find theme-based, high quality blogs to promote your campaigns?
• Even if you are contacting a SEO company for guest posting what are the parameters you must consider high?

Here are a few advices how to do it at its best?

Avoid dealing with individual bloggers:

If you are searching relevant and high quality blogs through Google the job is not that easy. You don’t know whether a blog accepts guest post or not, let it be it free or paid.  Moreover it is time consuming if you are rummaging a number of blogs for guest posting.

Plus you are not sure whether your post will be published within due time or not.  Contacting individual bloggers for guest posting is bit difficult as you don’t have a standard price rate or a formal agreement.

Dealing with a company hosted blogs is safer option:

It is a good idea to contact a SEO company who hosts number of quality blogs across any theme – all maintained internally. The advantages of dealing with them are manifold as follows:

1. You have a single point of contact. No need to handle hundreds of contacts and wasting time in it.
2. No need to rush, as you won’t run out of time. A complete list of guest blogs will be given to you.
3. You have ample choice to choose the best ones. You can check with blog layouts, traffic, page rank and other parameters at your discretion.
4. Such blog networks are well professionally maintained so you don’t have to worry about link life. Once you get a deal it will be as per terms and conditions only.
5. You are sure about the budget to spend from the very beginning. Any transaction related matters can be solved very easily since the company will keep a track of every deal you make.
6. Since you have access to any number of blogs in any topic you need the whole process gets quicker.
7. Reliability, stability and easy communication are what make this guest blogging option a better choice.

Measure the quality of a blog:

Don’t always run for Page Rank (PR) of a blog.  Even a well maintained, theme related, great looking blog may not have a high PR. What is most important here is the number of backlinks and traffic a guest blog has.

Check if the blog categories suit your website requirements. 1 or 2 in bound links from a decent-looking blog carries much weight than a high PR but irrelevant blog. Stick to blogs that actually looks like a blog, not a site with link deposits.

Thus you can capitalize on guest blogging benefits. If you have any queries ask for expert advices.

Why use Video for online marketing? The reason is…

“Videos have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text versions in universal search results“

Videos are all the rage over the internet. The stats and survey results published by Nielsen shows that video search and watching is rapidly becoming a popular over the internet. There has been significant rise in online video viewership over the past few years. The recent Nielsen report points the emerging trend of video watching -

“The new trend among our TV and Internet homes shows the lightest traditional television users streaming significantly more Internet video via their computers, and the heaviest streamers under-indexing for traditional TV viewership. This behavior is led by those ages 18-34.”

The number of unique viewers is a whopping 143 Million in the middle of the year 2011. From January to June, 2011 online video watching time has grown to 44.5% which is 4 hours 39 minutes per user with an “increase of 4 percent from May” this year.

YouTube, as expected, holds the top position with 8.5 billion video streams and unique 112,764 viewers in the first quarter of 2011. The statistics nothing but reinforces the fact that videos are becoming more and more important in the sphere of digital marketing. If we dig deeper into the facts the largest audience of internet video is the adult lot (age group 35-49 yrs) while growing interest in mobile videos is evident among today’s youth (age between 24 and 35 yrs). High-end mobile phones with increasing display size further indicate that the trend of online video watching is not to die down soon.

So, this is something small businesses can capitalize on.

When you search with ‘soccer training’ it’s a list of videos that appears in the search result page along with website pages.

The search engine is smart enough to know when to include the video in the result page for a particular search term even if there is no mention of the word ‘video’. Or in other words, it knows when a topical video will be of more interest to the searcher and displays results accordingly.

For example a video on “how to train your dog” is much more effective than its plain text counterpart that may not appeal to the searcher at all with boring textual instructions and paragraphs to read.

Secondly, if we become more specific with video search such as ‘dog training videos’ the result is an assortment of related YouTube videos as well as video content from relevant websites.

So, incorporating video in your online marketing campaign can prove beneficial if it is optimized properly.

Now, the question is how to best optimize your videos for search engines?  

There are two ways you can optimize your videos. One is utilizing the video sharing platforms like YouTube and the other is posting video content in your own website.  You can upload video content exclusively on your website and then share it via social networks.

If you are a ‘dog trainer’ or organizing ‘soccer training camps’ or selling products like vacuum cleaner it’s wise that you create a video content for your website as well as YouTube as it is the most popularly accessed video platform.

Google Plus, the recent craze over the Internet, lets you share your video content within your Circle. Therefore, it is important how you optimize your video content for your website promotion.

Here is what you can do to get the best ROI with your video content:

• Upload your videos to prominent sharing platforms.
• Use popular keywords in the video title and add keywords rich description to it with your website address embedded in it.
• Don’t forget to tag your videos using some targeted keywords.
• Post video content regularly in social media and other networking sites if you want consistent viewership.
• For on-site videos create and use a video sitemap if you have a considerable number of videos on the site.
• Use informational keywords that focus solely on the topic, service or the products. Long tail keywords including phrases like “how to”, “why”, “what is” have better prospect when it comes to video optimization.
• Avoid transactional keywords that is, phrase including words like “buy”, “sale”, “free”, “cheap” etc. Studies found that use of transactional keywords in video optimization causes adverse effect.
• It is often noticed that videos ranking well on the universal SERPs also ranks high on its own platform. Conclusion is, if your video tops the ranking on YouTube chances are high that it will perform well on universal SERPs as well.
• Do make your videos easily sharable.

And last but not the least is to make real good videos that are relevant to your service/product and at the same time useful for the viewers. Good videos often shared over the social media by common users. And that’s the most rewarding part of video optimization.

Within 2 weeks of its launch Google Plus has gained 10 million users and the number now reached to 20 millions. What is more interesting is that some websites have come up with ‘exciting offers’ of ‘Google +1 for Sale!”. You can get 50 to 2000 +1 clicks for your site by spending for a good buck.

The Questions
But the questions that are abuzz on the web are -

• What is the future of SEO with Google +?
• How is it going to affect SEO?
• What features of Google Plus can benefit SEO?
• How +1 can lead to better ranking?
• How to add +1 button to my site?

The Side Effects
SEOs are concerned about how the use of Google +1 button can be manipulated and how spammers can misuse it (one case is already mentioned above). And website owners are in a hurry to embed Google +1 button in their websites.

Plus One Reporter, a Google +1 automatic link checker is already available in the market. An internet software development company has built this utility software capable of generating report on the Google +1 count for a list of URLs.

Google+ Features that can Influence SEO

Now coming back to SEO, currently, there are two features in Google Plus that might prove beneficial in terms of SEO.

+1 Button: The +1 button as Google has mentioned is a way to tell your friends and acquaintances that “you should check this out”. While you plus-one a website to help your friends to find what they are looking for the plus-oned website definitely gets an advantage with this recommendation. So far it is available as long as you are logged in to your Google account.

Sparks: The Spark shows a bunch of recent news and updates of your interest. It not only quarries the most recent updates from the web it also provides user an option to share it in his/her circle. With this feature Google again establishes the importance of freshness of content.

Unlike Facebook that emphasizes on the most recent activities and creations Google’s search engine counts the age of the domain as a ranking factor. Now Google pioneering the world of search it is quite expected that the search engine giant may try to integrate its social media recommendation with its organic searches to take online search to the next level. Though keywords will be used to perform searches but the metrics of keyword selection will see some changes.

Blogroll link concept speaks the same:

Take Blogroll links for example. If you notice, even a couple of years back, webmasters were looked hungry for collecting blogroll links for their client’s website. For them, getting a blogroll link from good, relevant blog meant- a potential vote which carried outstanding value from ranking point of view. In fact, many a times, advertisers used to buy such blogroll links from the market by paying hefty sum.

However, scenario has changed today. You won’t find SEO professionals scratching head to collect such links.   A very few people take genuine interest on exchanging blogroll links. It is more of old habit today which is going to be obsolete soon.

Important questions for webmasters:

Did you ever guess the reason of this decline? What made Blogroll links less popular among web crowds? What this change refers to?  Is this shift justified?

Why are Blogroll links becoming extinct?

There could be one potential reason of it, I guess.  Blogroll links (also called site wide links) are shown in the inner pages of a blog other than home page. It means you are getting same link from same domain but from different pages. Since a blog gets updated every day, it seems you are getting only one link from “N” number of sub pages.

Now Google does not give any extra credit to such link. Since it is from the same domain only, links from inner pages do not pass any link juice.  Even, when you count backlinks for your client site, these multiplied links get automatically added.  This creates an illusion for real backlink figure.

Thus, blogroll links do not serve any added benefits to backlink profile as it was thought earlier.

So, what is on the move these days? Is there any replacement of Blogroll links?

Yes, there are. It is Home Page Only visible link which looks pretty similar to Blogroll only, but is different in terms of page placement.

The idea is simple. Home Page only links are refined version of blogroll text or image links. Here inner pages are excluded from the links, so you see them only on the home page.  Thus, there is no chance of having duplication during backlink count. Even to Google, this home page only link carries enough value.

Home page image or text links can also be used as advertisements.

How are home page only links created?

This is a pure technical matter.  Web designers having good knowledge in WordPress PHP and coding can only do it.

If you want to know more about this, write to us. We will cite you real examples of Home page link placement in our networked blogs.

Posted by – Sanat Singha

Launch of the redesigned website of Softz Solutions attempts to boost our primary objective – optimum customer satisfaction! To experience the added features, easier navigation and enhanced interactivity of the new site, visit us at http://www.softzsolutions.com/

How does the new site differ from the earlier one? Here are a few points of distinction you are sure to notice.

Enhanced Services for Success

Adding new services, and new dimensions to existing ones, helps augment the scope of your business. What’s new on offer? The On-Page and Off-Page service makes up the complete SEO Services. The newly added Content writing services incorporate website content development as well as other essential elements.

Apart from user and search engine friendly website designing, we also offer blog creation, customization and optimization services. The best advantage of using our White Label SEO Services is that it offers complete confidentiality.

We provide complete organic SEO Solutions, including conversion optimization services, as well as PPC Management Services. Softz Solutions sure is a one-stop shop for all your SEO related business needs!

• Portfolio that Speaks for itself: SEO Folio, Website Folio or Blog Folio – take your pick and view a few examples of what we do and how we do it. If you feel our work is good enough for your business, which you sure would, contact us to know more.

• Inclusion of Package Details: Offering the exact details of how much each service would cost helps you chalk out your financial plan. Get to know our packages and the associated expense.

• Adding an Element of Interactivity: If you have a query, you can just send us a message using the form on the ‘Contact Us’ page. You may also get in touch via different means – email, telephone, messenger and fax. Contacting us was never easier!

• Revamping the Knowledge Centre: Want to know more about our tutorials? Want to check out the SEO tools? Want to know the meaning of a specific term? Our knowledge centre aims to help you know more about SEO and how it enhances the scope of online businesses.

We have tried our best to come up with a website that offers you the maximum of information with the minimum of efforts. We welcome all your feedback regarding this endeavour of ours to help us achieve more in future!

Countdowns Didn’t Finish Yet:

Yes, this time Infocom 2011 was bigger. Bigger than what we thought it to be. Not just because, the number of speakers, delegates and visitors were more this time at Salt lake stadium ground. At least for Softz Solutions – the branded Indian SEO company, the counts still move on. Yes, we are still in the process of figuring out business prospects and visitor’s enquiries. The experience was heart throbbing, the business response was outstanding and people’s enthusiasm on us surpassed all of our expectations.

The Factors That Differentiated Us in the Event:

Softz Solutions as a team is proud to be the part of India’s one of the most promising ICT mega event Infocom 2011. Not to surprise, we were the only exhibitor representing leading Search Engine Optimization service provider in India. Yes, it sounds well, but quite challenging. The target was to confront public expectations with our domain experience.

Our Theme Was – If you have a commercial website and your target clients are online, we are there to help you get visible on Google’s top result pages.

We Had A Single Voice Throughout The Days – Your customers are educated enough not to get trapped by overboard marketing. Do something that people rely on; do something that people like by nature. The days are gone when web users were used to be tempted with online ads, pop ups or unsolicited mails. Think of wider space to build your reputation online.

It is a good that top notch people realized and started thinking otherwise. The message was clear to them as we had rightly conveyed it.

How We Did:

As a company branding and awareness campaign we did pretty well. In fact, this was the first time we came in public in India. And, the way business-minded people and enthusiasts greeted us, we are overwhelmed.

The event showed us a new horizon. Top CEOs, MDs, Directors of Indian ICT companies wanted us to be their online marketing partner.

Of course, the post event analysis is still on. And, already good number of potential clients visited our office for joining hands. We appreciate their concern and effort, making us proud to be your trusted SEO service provider in India.

Infocom 2011 – Photo Gallery

We Can Still Breathe The Positive Repercussion!

So, how can you, as a content writer, create search engine friendly content that is also engaging?

Redundancy: Avoid repeating sentences. Whatever you depict in the first paragraph shouldn’t recur in the paragraphs that follow even if you are writing on an interesting topic. Redundancy can only annoy the readers and drive them away. Be precise. Precision makes it easier for the visitors to memorize what they have read in your site.

Precision: Sometimes content writers tend to stretch a sentence unnecessarily just for the sake of increasing word count. Try to make it short and crisp. If you can describe it in one word use it instead of an elaborate sentence.

Organization: Organizing paragraph and structuring sentences are very important. The combination of simple and grammatically correct sentences and smaller paragraphs projecting a single idea proved to be very effective in web content writing.

Figures of Speech: Using figure of speech might add a new degree to your content. But do not overuse it. While writing web content one should keep it in mind that you are describing a service/product in a way to compel your readers to buy the service/product. And your write up is not going to be archived as a literary piece. Even though web content writing is a creative job focusing on the practical side would help.

Mood: The way you write sets the mood for the readers. It is wise to be suggestive than writing in a commanding note. Touch of subtle humor will nevertheless make your write up even more interesting and acceptable.

Keywords: To make your content search engine friendly you need to maintain proper density of keywords, usually 2 to 3 percent, in the content. The title that is to be used in H1 heading plays a very important role.  Make sure your title contains the main keyword/key phrase.

However, following tips and tricks for better writing can help you to some extent. But there is no alternative to reading.  Just as you like to read good books reading others’ works will help you improve.