What is Search Engine Optimization

The value of using SEO is clear. Studies have shown that organic search results are more highly trusted than PPC (SEM) advertising. SEO is about having the right knowledge, applying proven techniques, experimenting with new ones, and letting the search engine do the rest. Naturally, the prerequisite to all of that is to have engaging content and a quality product (or service). Stay away from:

- Making changes to emulate the competition without knowing why the change was made

- Not trying different keywords, and instead stopping at only one or a few

- Making frequent SEO-related changes without realizing the effects of previous changes

The SEO work for each website is different. What is similar, though, is the actual SEO process. You still have to go through the same exercise, regardless of whether you are working on a new site or an existing one.

The SEO process is always in motion. Along its path, several artifacts are produced to foster better tracking and management of overall SEO efforts. When done properly, working through the SEO process phases will take time.

Once the major SEO efforts are complete (in the implementation phase), SEO becomes more of an operational activity as opposed to a full-blown project. With the SEO fundamentals in place, your website will be on the right path toward increased search engine visibility.

Web spider patterns

Wed spiders evolve and change just as your websites evolve and change. The more you give the more you get. The “give” come in the form of content. The “get” comes in the form of search engine referrals for your keyword-optimized web pages. Wed spiders start with a “feeling out” process. They come once in a while to say “hello” until they get a better idea about your site. Once they get a good sense of your website, they come back with a fury if your website offers them food in the way of good content. Depending on the type of website you are running, spider visits can be less or more frequent. If you are constantly providing new content does not change much, spiders will still visit your site, albeit less frequently.

Web page caching

Many commercial and noncommercial products come with caching options. Inspect your applications and evaluate whether you need to use caching. If you are developing a new application or are using an existing application that does not have a caching capability, you can implement one yourself with very little programming. There are many ways to accomplish web caching. In this subsection, I will explain how to implement one of the simplest wed caching techniques. It involves obtaining a particular dynamic web page snapshot in time and then serving this static version to end users. Furthermore, to ensure content freshness, there is usually a scheduled, automated task that repeats the process at defined intervals. The most popular use of web application caching is for news websites. Making his work well requires knowing and using the so-called welcome files in the right order. You can think of welcome files as default web page files that will open if a web user requests a URL, only specifying a directory at the end of the URL. The web server than looks at the welcome file list to determine what to serve. Usually, on PHP host the first file to be served is index. html or index .htm. This is followed by index.php.

The Social Graph

Just as you are able to track your communication with an existing customer through the relationship life cycle, you can track customers and other influences through that same relationship as they create content and converse on the Social Web. This can be very enlightening and is really useful when pulled into the product design process. Social CRM helps you understand and apply the significant points in the conversations happening around you. It helps you tie this information into your business, where you can use it to build relationships with influential customers and with influenetial bloggers, critics, and others who follow your firm or track your business or industry. You can apply this same discipline internally, too, and connect customer and external influences to your employees, to the Customer Service manager, to brand managers, and to others. Once connected in this way, your customer and employees can bond further, moving toward collaboration. It's collaboration that drives customer centric product and service innovation, and collaboration that leads to the highest forms of engagement with your customer.

Vendor Relationship Management

Given the rise of the Social Web, the new role of the customer and the concepts of Social CRM have counterpart in business supply chain processes: Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Beyond employee customer interactions and Operations led production and delivery processes, what are the additional points of impact in the creation of the customer experience? What about businesses with a more complex supply chain, or whose control over the delivery experience depends on the direct or indirect contributions of other firms and organizations? Think about vacation and destination travel services, where a holiday package offered through American Express may involve multiple customer facing partners. How do the concepts of Social CRM transform?

The Cluetrain Manifesto holds that the best marketing is conversational, built around interaction between the business and its customer, and between customers themselves. This philosophy underlies Social CRM in that it ties the conversation not just the transaction into the business processes. Vendor Relationship Management is about the application of the social tools that create and support collaborative conversations throughout the supply chain and delivery channels. To the extent that the Social Web is the evidence of push back by consumers against traditional marketing in favor of a more collaborative experience with brands, products , and services VRM is about extending the sought after collaborative experiences to the entire supply chain.

Spend Your way to a Social Presence

The appeal to a higher calling to a lifestyle, passion, or cause is what drives organic participation and growth in online social communities. The payoffs are lower ongoing expenses and a higher degree of "stickiness" and participation and advocacy for the community. Given the central role established for the higher social object, a question arises here: What is it that powers social marketing applications, communities, and sites which lack a cause, passion, or lifestyle connection as seen in programs like Pepsi's "The Juice"? The answer is typically spending. This is not to overlook the great creative work that goes into promotional campaigns, but rather to note that spend driven programs versus purpose or values aligned programs will often lag in the organic growth that truly powers social media and the waves of activity that occur on the Social Web. To understand why this so, compare the Social appeal of the Old Spice Deodorant Social Media Campaign with the basic social appeal of Facebook, Orkut or other social networking sites, where participation is driven largely out of a desire to interact with other members of these networks. People join them to meet other people as well as to share experiences around the brands they love (along with a whole lot of other things).

Build Your Social Presence

Campaign centric communities are not the focus of a social business program. If you find yourself thinking "campaign", you are either heading for social media based marketing or traditional/ digital marketing that is made to "look like" social media. Beware: The focus of social business distinct from social media marketing is around the application of the Social Web to business in ways that are driven fundamentally through organic versus paid process and which are intended to benefit your business generally versus sell products specifically.

Organic communities and Social Web activities built around a business are designed to exist independently of direct spending in marketing, with the possible caveat of initial seeding. They are intended to inform the business, to connect it to its audience, and to encourage collaboration between customers and employees toward the objective of improving the business, and to sustain this over time for the purpose of driving superior business results. It is equally likely that the software and related infrastructure expenses of a social business program will be paid for through Operations or IT as through Marketing.