Social media users love to be heard, and if you are listening they can provide a great service to your company.

Gauge User Data
By implementing a website analytics tool such as Google Analytics you can see what content most interests your users, what content they are reading, what links they used to get to your site and what they searched for to find your site. If you know your user types, referring sites and what keywords they used to find your site you can then create more favorable content. By understanding this data it should in turn give you the answer as to why other sites trust you and what related topics you should consider.

Free Focus Group
Standard focus groups are a marketer's dream, one that is often unfulfilled due to high costs. By polling your social media users you can create focus groups for free allowing you to research for product concept, price validation, location based product offers and positioning. Most social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have applications which allow you to easily create polls.

Receive Feedback
Social media is an immediate feedback loop. Give your marketplace a platform to provide feedback so you can improve your products and services to better your business. Social media also opens the door to provide immediate customer service to problems you may not otherwise been aware of. By setting up a monitoring system such as Google Analytics you can see what others are saying about you and immediately address any problems or concerns about your product.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion." - Wikipedia. In English please... Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website listed higher in search engines without paying for placement.

It seems that in today's world anybody with a little bit of internet knowledge thinks that they can be an SEO Specialist: insert keywords here, submit site to search engines and wa-la instant SEO. Unfortunately it's not so easy; and neither is deciphering the legitimate SEO companies from the fly-by-nighters. Avoid these 5 SEO tricks and you will be on your way to a better ranked website without risking damage to your site or your reputation.

1. “We can successfully have your rankings increased within 48 hours!”

SEO is a time consuming process, anybody who says that you will see almost immediate results is lying to you. Any legitimate SEO Specialist will spend hours slaving over keyword research, conversion rates, traffic and ranking reports, etc. It will take days to implement SEO terms and weeks or even months to see the final effect of a higher page rank.

2. “We submit your site to 1,000s of Search Engines!”

I don't know about you, but I cannot even begin to name 10 reliable search engines, let alone 1,000's. Stick with Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formally MSN) and you will be fine, most other search engines piggy-back off these three anyways. Search engines these days don't even really need to have your site submitted, with all their spiders and robots they will pick-up a well optimized site on their own.

3. “We will get 1,000s of links to your site!”

Although this probably isn't an outright lie, it's not a safe SEO practice. Sure having a large number of links to your site is a good thing, but what you want is QUALITY links. SEO scammers will rely on "link farms" to generate links to your site and search engines don't like this, they don't like it so much it will actually decrease your ranking. Make the search engines happy and stick with a smaller number of quality links.

4. “We will optimize your site for $59.95 a month!”

I know that you've heard the old adage "you get what you pay for" and this could not be more true than in SEO land. See trick 1: Proper SEO takes time, and time takes money. Good SEO should cost you $1,000s of dollars, if you can't afford this you are better off buying a book about SEO and doing it yourself than getting scammed. And be sure before signing a contract that your SEO will be maintained after the initial optimization at no extra charge. Search engines often change algorithms, the way they rank sites, and competition for keywords and ranking can get pretty brutal in certain industries. If your SEO is not maintained, your rankings will slip.

5. “We guarantee you #1 Google ranking!”

Nobody, I repeat NOBODY, can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Don't be weary of all guarantees though, often times reputable SEO companies will offer guarantees. These guarantees, however, are usually about an increase in your page ranking and not a guaranteed placement. If you are in a competitive industry often times a first page ranking may be difficult if not impossible to obtain even with the best SEO.

Choose Your SEO Company Carefully:

Now that you are on your way to identifying and avoiding SEO tricks you will still want to check out your SEO company carefully before signing on the dotted line. Some reliable sources for research are:

·         Check with the Better Business Bureau, see if any claims have been filed against them

·         WHOIS tools (such as www.iptools.com), to find out who the domain is registered to and who the administrative/technical contacts are and if these contacts are legitimate

·         Google, type in the name of the company and scam and see if anything negative comes up

·         Also just Google the company's name, if they can't get themselves top ranking SEO how can you expect them to do it for you?

More specifically - the importance of web standards. It's a big subject in the field of web design, and not an easy one to explain. There's a chance I should be picking something a little easier to start this off with, but what the heck, let's just jump right in, both feet!

A Look Back

The phrase "web standards" - or "standards-based design", or a number of other, similar, variations - refers to websites built in accordance with the W3C HTML and CSS rules. The W3C is an organization - possibly closer to a confederation - of designers, internet guru-type, and professionals in the field. Established in 1994, it had - and still has - the single goal of establishing a standard, usable, nonpartisan set of rules and regulation for website code. With the so-called Browser Wars just getting started at the time, there was a lot of need for an entity like this.

Let's back up a minute. Let's step back even away from the web itself, and look at computing in the mid to late eighties. Yeah, I don't like looking back there, either. But it's a dirty job, and... you get the point. In 1987, your average home computer - such as there was - ran MS-DOS, a command-line operating system that didn't look very pretty, but got the job done. Well, it did for one fellow, anyway. At one task. Unfortunately, his neighbor had a slightly different computer, and everything looked just a little different for him. And that other guy down the street? He was using a Mac - with pictures on screen, and everything! They could all use the machines to push out work, but consistency? Fellow A seeing the same thing that Fellow B does? Not a chance.

It's the same way with internet browsers and web standards. In those dark "pre-W3C" days, while the base rules of the web were already pretty accepted (things like <p>, <b>, <i> tags), there was a push to do more with it, and no baseline way to actually do so. Which led to browsers themselves - Internet Explorer and Netscape, back then - to offering extensions themselves. We got marquee and blink tags. No, I won't illustrate them for you. Of course, blinking text only worked in IE, and marquee? That was Netscape-only, for a time. While now we can look back and sigh with relief that only part of the market had to suffer through those, at the time, that was cutting-edge... and you had to pick one or the other.

All this might have been acceptable when the web consisted of a lot of text, and a few pictures off to the side here and there, but then designers and marketing got ahold of it. And now? Well, look around at the site you're on. Little bit more detailed than "lots of text, and a few pictures." Marketing is about appearance and presentation, and business wants a lot of control over those things. Right now, we've got a number of browsers in the market - IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome - if each displayed things in a substantially different way, what a fright that'd be for marketing! Which is where standards come in.

The Status Quo

Right now, standards-based design is finally - yes, it took this long - beginning to come into its own. The W3C has published multiple versions of their rules, and the importance is really becomming recognized. The early adopters picked it up years ago, but for a lot of folk, it's only just now becoming clear. And it's a good thing. As developers, the fact that browsers generally support the standards means that we can design a site like this, and expect it to look the same to us, our cousins, and the client over on the other side of the country. And not only now, but in the future - two years from now, we won't have to redo all our work because things have changed around and the look is broken and fractured, appearing a dozen different ways to a dozen different folks. That's money saved right there.

This is getting long, so let's leave of here for a bit. Next time, we'll cover the SEO, accessibility, and other benefits provided by standards.

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