Social media marketing encompasses any social media you can think of, but the big two are Facebook and Twitter. Just because some of the competitors aren’t as big doesn’t mean you should ignore them, though. The definition is also shifting, and sites like YouTube fit into that category as well.

Google Plus is a good example of a social network that has relatively few users (65 million for Google Plus, about 750 million unique monthly visitors for Facebook (they actually have more users than that, but many of them are robo users or users who for all intents and purposes have let their accounts die).

Blogs would also be considered social media. They can easily be linked into Twitter and Facebook, and allow for a free exchange between you and your readers (and between your readers and your readers). That sets it apart from the main web page, which is mostly content going out without much interaction possible.

That is why social media in all its forms is so important to a concerted online marketing or promotional plan. This takes a consistent effort on the part of the business or organization (some charities make excellent use of social media) but it is worth it in the long run.

According to the Dayton Business Journal 1 the top fifteen social media sites as of December 2012, in order of estimated unique monthly visitors per site (ascending) is:

1. Badoo 2.5 million unique monthly visitors
2. myLife 5.4 million unique monthly visitors
3. Meetup 7.5 million unique monthly visitors
4. Ning 12 million unique monthly visitors
5. CafeMom 12.5 million unique monthly visitors
6. Pinterest 15.5 million unique monthly visitors
7. Orkut 17.5 million unique monthly visitors
8. Tagged 19.5 million unique monthly visitors
9. LiveJournal 20.5 million unique monthly visitors
10. DeviantArt 25.5 million unique monthly visitors
11. Google plus+ 65 million unique monthly visitors
12. MySpace 70.5 million unique monthly visitors
13. LinkedIn 110 million unique monthly visitors
14. Twitter 250 million unique monthly visitors
15. Facebook 750 million unique monthly visitors

This list will shift in very short spans. Facebook at the moment has the largest audience, but the other sites can be worth the time it takes to join, depending on exactly how you are going to be putting your social media presence into use.

There are several strategies that work across the spectrum, and there are sites which the above list does not contain, such as blogs and YouTube.

A basic social media strategy would look something like this. Identify the 2 or 3 most useful social media outlets for your individual needs and sign up for accounts. In this instance, let’s use YouTube, Facebook and a Google or WordPress blog.

The goal in all of these is not to be repetitively promotional, though. You will want to do some promotional posts, but you want to give people good advice in your area of expertise, expert opinion on various subjects dealing with your business or other interesting and relevant content. That way when you do something promotional it will stand out.

Imagine a local hardware store – they write a blog about redoing your walls in another decorating scheme, and that links to a video that you post on YouTube which shows an employee actually using the techniques described in the blog piece. You may want to embed that video into the blog as well. Whether you do or not you would still link to the YouTube page that holds the video.

On Facebook, you make a post with an excerpt of the blog post and a link to the blog post and the video. In this way, one action is taking place across multiple planks in your social media platform. It is when strategies are coordinated in this manner that they are most effective in two areas.

The first is links. According to the new Google standards they are counted heavily because of the relevance of the links.

The second and more important aspect in the area of social media marketing is the content. If it is helpful and entertaining to your customers and visitors they will keep coming back. Facebook can easily be transferred to a “ask us any question and we’ll give you honest advice” type forum, with the best questions being followed up on in a blog post and new video.

All of these entities then link back into your blog and taken as a whole will make up a large part of most businesses online marketing efforts.

It is equally effective for online only businesses and local retail shops or restaurants. In fact, for local brick and mortar stores social media can be the most powerful of the tools that internet SEO practices offer, and Twitter is great for local businesses. Videos posted to YouTube can be a fun way to build a community as well.

Using these strategies does take a sustained effort, whether you do it yourself or pay someone to do it. Your blog should be posted to at least once every one to two weeks, and Facebook and Twitter might see three or four posts a day.

This involves reading what people who have friended you say, both in your blog and on Facebook and Twitter. The type of posts you will want to make involve answering a question or helping someone with a problem (say, recommending your plumber) or you can say something that will contribute to an ongoing conversation.

Just remember, this is a public forum. You will almost never want to inject politics or religion in your posts, or at least be careful to be extremely sensitive to anyone who might be out there. An offhand comment can take on a life of its own!

Social Media marketing can be very effective, whether you are trying to increase the popularity of your personal website, your band, a movie project or a brick and mortar business. It takes a sustained effort, but it is within the reach of anyone to develop a good online presence and build a cohesive online community of fans and customers.

Along with on going monthly search engine optimization meetings, keyword pay per click spending analysis, and researching your competitors back links – our search engine optimization service focuses in on SEO copywriting, search engine friendly site construction, link building and on page SEO. This includes the search optimization work that we do on your web site’s pages, which consists of optimizing important HTML tags and improving your content so it’s easier for your customers to find you as well as the search engines. Our Off Site SEO Services (International SEO, National SEO or Portland SEO) refers to the work that we do to promote your business on other websites that are relevant to your industry.

This is just a brief overview of what we practice, for more information contact us or give us a call at 503-896-2209.

Search Engine Optimization Services

On-Site SEO:

• Content Review
• Title Tag Revisions
• Meta Keyword Updates
• Meta Description Revisions
• Alt Tag Optimization
• Paid Analytics (not Google Analytics)
• Return on Investment Tracking (ROI) Consulting
• Monthly Search Engine Ranking Reports
• 1 Hour of Monthly SEO Consulting

Off-Site SEO:

• Mini Website Creation
• Content Creation
• Link Building
• Social Media Marketing
• Article Creation
• Article Distribution

We don’t offer a cookie cutter internet marketing solution, but if you want a custom quote for search engine optimization or pay per click management for your website, click here to contact us. We’ll get back to you within the same business day or at the latest by the following day.

Search Engine Optimization By Greg Beddor

Google

Yahoo

Bing

Facebook

AOL

Ask Jeeves

Comcast

Additionally, in the same day we can have your website at the top of Bing.com and Yahoo.com if that’s where you want to be.

For more information on our Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) Optimization Services contact us us today via email or call 503-896-2209 to get the SEO – Search Engine Optimization going on your PPC campaign today.

** This PPC service is referencing the pay per click section (sponsored listings) of all the search engines listed above including Google, Yahoo and Bing. Click here for more information on our organic seo services.

Google Adwords SEO by Greg Beddor

If you’re a small law firm, or start up, how can you compete with the law firms in the skyscrapers downtown?

Search.

Search has leveled the playing ground for nearly all industries making it possible for mom and pop shops or small businesses to compete with Fortune 500 companies at the top of the search engines. Don’t believe me? I’ll show you.

With our experienced search engine optimization and online marketing team, we can help almost any company with a good website and modest marketing budget get to the top of all search engines through SEO optimization and careful planning.

If you’re interested in SEO or to get an internet marketing campaign going for your website, click here to contact us – we’ll get back to you within 24 hours with a custom quote catered to fit your online marketing goals or needs.

Law Firm/ Lawyer SEO by Greg Beddor

Google

Yahoo

Facebook

AOL

Ask Jeeves

Comcast

Additionally, in the same day we can have your website at the top of Bing.com and Yahoo.com if that’s where you want to be.

For more information on our Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) Optimization Services contact us us today via email or call 503-896-2209 to get the SEO – Search Engine Optimization going on your PPC campaign today.

** This PPC service is referencing the pay per click section (sponsored listings) of all the search engines listed above including Google, Yahoo and Bing. Click here for more information on our organic seo services.

We offer on-going monthly SEM services.

Pay Per Click Optimization:

• Keyword Research
• Google Adwords
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Return on Investment Tracking (ROI) Consulting
• Monthly Reporting
• Monthly SEO Consulting

Social Media SEO:

• Facebook Ads
• Re-Targeting
• Banner Advertising
• Twitter Ads
• Linkedin PPC
• Social Media Foot Print Creation

If you would like to know more about our search engine marketing and website optimization services, click here to contact us.
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Portland Search Engine Marketing by Greg Beddor

Using Google sitemaps for your for SEO and displaying the MLS listings in a search engine friendly way is key for professional real estate websites but it’s not enough. For tough real estate sectors (including Oregon & Hawaii) its important to have a broad online marketing campaign that includes social media seo, search engine optimization, real estate portals, link building, local optimization and a solid presence in real estate social networks such as ActiveRain.com and Zillow.

Combined together we offer SEO and Social Media Marketing Services for Hawaii & Oregon Real Estate Companies.

If you’re interested in a comprehensive yet affordable internet marketing plan for your real estate business, call or click here to contact us.
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Real Estate SEO by Greg Beddor

If they’ve stacked up, its hard to hide those pictures, videos, comments or old stories even if your personal profile pages are set to private. Often what ever you type, add or attached while logged in to a website becomes property of that website. Including Twitter and Facebook.

Outside of staying out of trouble and being a good human being, the more you plan ahead, the more you take time to create a good reputation for yourself online, the less time and money you’ll need to spend in the future to combat negative information. Combining that with simply realizing that the information you put out on the internet can always find a way back to you will go a long way with most people’s online reputations.

Online Reputation Management {ORM} helps people with online reputation issues such as negative journalism, bad reviews, untruths, ripoff reports, complaint boards and forums. Disgruntled ex-employees, partners, significant others and often competitors try to damage another person’s representation on the web. Unfortunately very few companies have strategies related to managing their online reputation.

If used properly there is a method to internet reputation management that can be applied to protect a persons name or a companies brand from being slandered on the world wide web. Outside of social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook, a few other problem sites that often include negative information are: Yelp.com, RipOffReport.com, Complaints.com, ConsumerAffairs.com, ComplaintsBoard.com and newspapers that get published online.

If you need help defending your online reputation, or for search engine reputation consulting call 503-896-2209 or click here to contact me.

Internet Reputation Management by Greg Beddor

Over the course of our SEO campaign, we will show you how the new inbound links we acquire for your website become an excellent source of long term targeted traffic. These new links that our Portland SEO consultants create for your website will help raise your organic search engine rankings in all search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo & AOL.com. It doesn’t happen overnight but with steady search engine optimization work on a regular basis we usually see first page results in 3 to 6 months. Highly competitive keyword phrases tend to take a few more months of SEO beyond the 8th month mark.

Creating new in bound links to your website through reciprocal link exchanges, blog posts, social media websites, press releases and article creation is a simple yet very efficient tool for promoting any website on the internet.

Increasing your link popularity helps with:

• Increasing your website traffic significantly.
• Improves your visibility in the search engines.
• Saves you a lot of advertising money.
• Saves you tons of time.

Up front, it’s important to keep in mind that SEO and link building takes time. Whether it’s for online reputation management or search engine ranking it takes a good link building manager who understands the right and the wrong type of links to target for a link building campaign. This is one reason why most online businesses hire a SEO company to help with the link building process and search engine optimization for their websites.

What We Do, Every Month:

• Find the websites to link with yours
• Create the link requests via email
• Wait on link requests from the websites we’ve emailed
• Process, organize, and manage the new links to your website
• Month after month, manage your link profile

Bottom Line: Link building is time consuming, difficult and can be frustrating at times. More importantly it’s a good idea to have an experienced SEO / link builder handle  your online reputation instead of handing it over to someone that doesn’t have your long term image in mind. If you’re interested in seeing a sample of our current search engine rankings or have any questions about building links for your website, contact us.

Professional Link Building by Greg Beddor