I made it my goal yesterday to learn the hows and whys when I attended the Dallas Online Marketing Summit, a 23 city tour featuring online marketing experts who teach business people how to maximize their social media and online marketing efforts.
I'm far from a social media expert after attending the conference yesterday, but I did pick up a few tips I think everyone can benefit from. Forgive me if these are too elementary. I started with the basics!
5 things I learned at OMS to increase your google rank from Ray "Catfish" Comstock:
1) To move up on the google search results page for "Dallas children's photographer" or "Tampa plastic surgeon" you need to have several incoming links to your site. An incoming link is when others link to your website from their website, twitter post, facebook page, etc.
2) Not all incoming links are created equal. That's why it's so important to seek out p.r. for your business. When the local newspaper or television station links to your site, those sources are more credible then when a client tweets that you just posted images of her child on your blog. And the more credible the source is, the more credit you get for that link so the higher your page rank on google.
3) To measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts, first
establish a baseline of how many incoming links you have coming into
your site. While it's tough to get a comprehensive list, you can start
with Yahoo, Google and Bing. I think Yahoo
is most straightforward.
4) After you've established a baseline, you can check to see if your efforts of blogging more often, facebooking more often with links to your website and having others link to your site is effective. Check the number of links you have after a publicity effort or incoming link building effort at Yahoo, Google and Bing. If your google rank is going up and your incoming links are going up, you're doing something right. If not, tweak and try again.
5) Partner with other businesses and link off to each other's sites from your blogs. Potential partners include clients (many clients have their own blogs now), professional organizations (when you do a charitable event make sure they are blogging about it and linking to your site from their website), business partners, vendors, friends, etc. Only ask people who you are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to if they will link to your site.
More to follow later this week about what I learned at this conference. I'm curious to know what your social media questions are and what you'd like to learn about social media from The Photography Business Institute. Comment below and tell me what you'd like to know!
Disclaimer - camera phone picture above. I'm not a photographer so I'm not claiming this is a good photo, staged correctly or even edited.
