Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Top Social Media Tools for Teams

If you are doing team work on social media accounts what are the most effective tools to use? For me, I like HootSuite, but I have looked at others. This post features three services you may want to consider for your own team’s use.

HootSuite
This is by far my favorite and then one that my team of six people uses to manage clients’ social media accounts. HootSuite used to be totally free, but now has a paid option. For personal users, you can still use HootSuite free, but for business team users such as myself you will pay based on the number of team members. We will soon be paying just a little under $100 a month for access to this online service. But we have many accounts and six team members working on the same account. You can check out HootSuite now.

CoTweet
This is a nice online application that is free as well to consider if you have just one or two team members and need to load multiple Twitter accounts. It does not offer Facebook Business Page features, but great for Twitter. The interface is easy to use and does allow you to review pending updates and sent updates as well as your streams. You can check out CoTweet now. Although I do not like the interface as much as I do the one at HootSuite for small teams using Twitter only this would be adequate and totally free.

I have looked at other applications but this post is about team social media work so TweetDeck although popular is not a good fit as it does not allow team collaboration. If you have one you really like, leave the name and link in the comments.

Please note that HootSuite will pay me a small commission, but only if you sign up for a Pro account.

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Social Bookmarking Not My Favorite Way to Boost SEO

I do like social bookmarking for some clients as a way to build one way inbound links, but I feel that there are better ways for other clients. Social bookmarking works great to build links for website and blog content that is timely, well written, and a hot web topic.

For the majority of business sites that focus on their own services, more mundane topics (although they could be of interest to a specific audience), social bookmarking may simply be too much trouble for the results that it generates. One big caveat is that if you have a well developed social bookmarking profile and many followers, you may have much better success than just opening an account and starting to bookmark away.

I find that if you are going to really invest time in building links a faster more sure way is to write article pieces and syndicate them on newsletter and content sites for others to grab while keeping in your bio block and link information. Even better is to see if you can guest write for a professional organization in your industry. The key here however is that any article you provide must be informational in nature and not focused on your own particular services.

Do I feel that social bookmarking has a place? Yes, absolutely, but it is labor intensive and best used for certain topics, content, and specific clients.

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Test Your hReview Tags to See if Google Will Grab Your Reviews for Google Places

I have been an early embracer of the rich snippet technology as when it was released about a year ago I felt that it would be to my and my client’s advantage to have the coding in place. However if you are expecting your hReview rich snippets to be picked up by Google Places or Google Maps from your website, you’d better do what I did and check your code.

Although my code was correct, for pages with more than one review, Google now requires an aggregate rich snippet tag – who knew! This is how I found out. Use this Google tool to add the URL of your page with your rich snippets and hReview tags. Find out if Google will be picking up your rich snippets. You may be like me; having to go back and quickly add an aggregate review tag to the page listing all your reviews as a number and the average rating.

Here’s the link to the tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets It is called the Rich Snippet testing tool.

With Google Places adding your own website reviews to your Google Places Page, now’s the time to help Google help you by making sure your code is ready to be picked up by the spider.

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What is Your Website Traffic? What’s Low?

That’s the question everyone wants to know… is my website traffic high, low or in between. For small businesses that are not start ups and have been on the web for over a year, I feel that traffic under 50 unique visitors a day is low.

If your website figures aren’t even in the double digits on the average in a 30 day period, you really need to start working to build your website traffic. Why have a website if no one visits it and if it does not generate leads for you?

Here’s another benchmark if you have over 100 unique visits a day and you are a small business your traffic is definitely in the normal to good zone. Higher than that around 200 visitors a day and you are doing great. If you have 30,000 unique visitors a day, you’d better be on a dedicated server before you give yourself a big pat on the back.

So if your numbers are low what should you and what can you do to boost them. Here are just a few suggestions to consider:

  • Start blogging but only if you can install a blog under your own domain name on your parent website’s server. That is really key! Offsite blogging won’t help you in this area.
  • Think about writing and syndicating articles at Google Knol, Go e-articles, ezine.com and other sites. The key here to your traffic will simply be the quality of your writing and the timeliness of your content.
  • The easy path is to drive traffic to your website with Google AdWords or MSN adCenter (for Yahoo and Bing). When you don’t have time to do the other things this is very workable. Pay per click costs but the traffic you can generate immediately to expose the world to your services and products is well worth the investment. Just make sure you are targeted and don’t create a branding campaign that just brings your impressions and clicks.
  • Work all your angles! Do you have friends with websites on the Web? Get links back from them to your site. Consider doing guest blog writing. Tap into your network. If you are a member of a national or regional association ask if you can guest write for their online archived newsletter or blog. You want links and exposure.

These are just a few ideas to consider. Typically pay per click as it is the easiest is the route most people will pursue when they have little web traffic. Take some time to make sure your website is generating the traffic you need to feed your business.