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When it comes to the web, there are always new terms being tossed around. A fairly interesting one I have come across several times that seems rather pertinent to the discussion of SEO/SEM and all things social is something called a “Digital Sociologist”. What is a digital sociologist, you ask? Great question – one I would like answered myself.

A digital sociologist is a person who studies the behavior of people when using digital technology, with it’s main focus on social media usage. This new study of people will probably remind you of the discussion we have had here many times on the topic of tribalization. Tribalization, if you recall, is the phenomena of people banding together on the web around a particular blogger, forum, brand, idea, belief, or what have you. Part of digital sociology would be to study this phenomena, and perhaps figure out how to make it work for your brand.

So many things are happening on the web. It’s only natural that some formal study of the behavior of people on the web take place. We (and most SEOs) have been doing it for years in the form of analytics. But, analytics alone can only tell us so much. They tell us what channel a user comes from, what pages they visited, what they bought, or where they spent most of their time on a particular site. From these analytics we can make educated guesses to help us tweak our strategies, but taking all of this a step further, to actually understand the feeling and beliefs of the user may help define a strategy to a greater extent. For some, it will help define why people behave they do about a particular blogger, brand, belief, etc.

Below is a very brief presentation on Digital Sociology by Ali Hadi. I would like to take the discussion much deeper, as I think this will ultimately have an impact on the way we do our jobs, especially as they pertain to social media and SEO/SEM.

Small businesses have a great opportunity with social media. It presents a “word of mouth” type of advertising that is sadly lacking in traditional marketing. People, oddly enough, are now looking to the web, and the people they ‘meet’ there, to help them make sound decisions on many major issues, including just about any purchase you can imagine. Brian Solis has an interesting article about small business utilizing digital sociology and social media if you’d like to read further and join the discussion.

I have been a long time believer and promoter of the The Longtail. What is The Longtail, you ask? Hopefully, if you are client, you already know the answer. Or better yet, you’ve just handed the whole ball of wax to Jen and the SEO department and told them to go crazy, so you don’t need to know about The Longtail.

The term “longtail” refers to a key phrase that uses more words to get a more specific and accurate search result. For example, if you went to your favorite search engine and typed in “grill”, you would get results showing anything from an actual barbeque grill manufacturer (kudos to Weber {who else?} for ranking 1st in Google for the term!), to a rapper with gold stuff glued to his teeth.

Now, if you were to search the term “gas grill” or “charcoal grill” you are much more likely to find what you need. So, let’s take it a step further, and search the longtail phrase “stainless steel gas grill”. You have now narrowed the results considerably and will most likely find precisely what you would like to purchase.

Turn that around and take a look at it from an E-commerce standpoint. Optimizing your product pages with the longtail can increase conversions if you are very careful to choose the correct phrase, and concentrate most of the optimization on this phrase. If you stuff your page with lots of other phrases, then you dilute the power of the longtail.href=”http://www.theseoblog.org”>TKG’s SEO blog had a great idea for incorporating longtail phrases into your site a couple of months or so ago. Be sure to check it out!

Dave Davies over at WebProNews has some great pointers for The Longtail. He has another great analogy that really works when applying your strategy to an e-commerce site. Made me want to go buy a new TV, though.

If you’re still confused as to what the ‘longtail’ is, or how to develop these phrases and optimize for them, this video: How to Rank on Google for Longtail Phrases was posted on April 21, 2010, has great info and is pretty detailed.

If you’re still having trouble, give us a call, we’d love to help you out!

Always on the lookout for my small business clients and friends, I have happened across and interesting offer from RatePoint, Inc. RatePoint provides copy in the form of testimonials, customer feedback, that sort of thing, for use on it’s clients’ web sites. This is a free offer for small business owners who are trying to maintain their online reputation. The services includes:

•Unlimited collection of reviews and testimonials from customers
•Unlimited automatic posting of content, such as newsletters, coupons and offers to Facebook and Twitter by simply checking a box
•Unlimited use of online surveys to collect customer insights
•Unlimited e-mail campaigns to a list of up to 125 contacts

This might work for some of you who need a hand in this department, but aren’t looking to spend money on it. I’ve mentioned here numerous times how important it is to build your brand and maintain your reputation online. This service may be helpful to you. It’ll probably be a bit cookie cutter, after all, it is a free service, but I’d wager that it has some very good points to it. There is a catch, each of the services offered have limitations. Such as only 125 email contacts for each email, you can’t post a review after 30 days, etc. These carry extra fees, thought they are minimal.
Overall, it is for sure better than nothing. If you have tried it or are using it, let me know what you think of it, I’d be interested to hear.

I’ve blogged quite a bit over the last couple of years, especially during the economic downturn, about making the most of your marketing budget. We’re seeing a turn around here in NE Ohio, but a lot of companies are being careful. They know they need to make the most out of their marketing budget.

If SEO isn’t part of your marketing strategy, I gotta ask why. Why, when it has been shown time and again to provide the best ROI? TKG’s SEO blog had a great post on this topic a few months back. The article outlined precisely why you should be using your marketing dollars for SEO. James Wells also has a great post about the Value of SEO in Your Marketing Budget. He makes the great point that “many companies are overlooking this extremely cost effective and valuable form of marketing”.

If you aren’t sure how much you should be spending on SEO, perhaps a better question would be to ask yourself how much money you would like to make. Marketing requires that you spend money to make money, as the old adage goes, but with SEO, sure, you’ll spend some money, but in truth, far less than with traditional marketing, with a much higher ROI. Once you develop a strategy, put it in place and tweak it as analytics dictate, you’ll start to see why I’ve been touting this stuff for so long.

If you don’t believe me, or these other guys, take a look at this fantastic Fox Small Business video. These guys are getting a taste of where their marketing budget should go to grow their small business printing personalized gifts for children. They are a perfect fit for SEO, and that’s the advice they are giving.

We’re more than half way through 2010. What kind of growth would you like to see this year? Do you want to spend a lot for a little, or a little to get a lot?

Those of us in the SEO world have been waiting around to see when and if Bing was going to really take off, be a major contender in the Search Engine game. Seems that time is upon us. Not only is Bing supposed to be merging with Yahoo! in the near future, powering results but Bing already provides the search results on Facebook. This combo, along with the fact that Bing -Yahoo! will provide about 35% of searches, means it needs to be considered when optimizing your site.

When it comes to Google Vs. Bing, it seems that on page efforts may be taking a back seat in both SEs to things like link building. Link building needs to consist of more than just a lot of links from one site, but need to concentrate to obtaining good links from lots of different sites. This will mean a small shift for some in strategy, but hopefully you are already diversifying your link building so as not to rely on one source.

We can all guess as to which elements of SEO will win out, or we can take a look at what the analytics tell us. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org has a great post up that walks you through the analytics of the whole thing. Pretty interesting – it’s gonna be interesting to see which elements are essentially the same, and who weighs which elements of SEO more heavily than the other.

Another question I put to you is what will this do in the wake of the MayDay update? What will happen to the long tail? Will the “exact match domain” matter as much as is being purported? “Exact match domain” refers to domains that are an exact match to your most relevant key phrases. We’ll have to see how analytics play out for a bit since the update. What this should mean is that your most relevant long tail phrase, if you used it in your url, should continue to matter, and in Bing – it will matter greatly.

While Google will still take over 65 percent of the market share, it is important to note that there is still a fairly large chunk (35%) to be claimed by the Yahoo!/Bing search engine. We will always optimize to make sure our clients are getting the most ROI, and I don’t see Bing changing that enough to warrant changing our best practices, however, I do think we need to pay attention to Bing and be prepared to make changes as needed.