Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Duncan_Wierman

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Did you know that you can market to people as they read their gmail.

Use the pay Per Click Google content network.

managed placement: mail.google.com

Exclusions: (Make sure you excluded all the following)

• Error pages
• Parked domains
• Embedded video
• Games
• Video
• Sexually suggestive content
• Military & international conflict
• Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
• Profanity & rough language
• Crime, police & emergency
• Death & tragedy
• Forums
• Image-sharing pages
• Social networks
• Video-sharing pages

You really only want you ad to show up on the gmail site.

Need help implementing this technique, give me a call 760 230 8687.

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I am sure you are going to start thinking that this blog is less about education issues and more about social media. Well, that isn't really true but it is clear that social media has great power, which is waiting to be unleashed at various places.

I am not writing this post in the form of a formal seminar paper and I am going to maintain my chatty tone throughout. However, the title “Twitter, Twitter: A Case for Social Media” is certainly a catchy seminar paper title.

I would like to approach this issue from various perspectives in my posts and in this post, I am going to focus on Twitter. However, let us begin with Mr. K Srinivasan of PR Point, a leading Public Relations practitioner in India. Mr. Srinivasan sincerely believes that social media should be taught to students in Indian colleges. I would be tempted to agree with him. Recently, I asked my media students to write about the way in which Barack Obama used social networking to his benefit. There was one student in my class, who said, “Sir, I don't know what this is all about.” There were twelve students present there and we are referring to a very reputed institute in the country. There were two other students that day who didn't articulate it the way, this person did but they too seemed quite lost. Then, another day, I was speaking to another set of students, again students who are studying at a very reputed institute. I was teaching them public relations and we were discussing how various social networking sites could be used to create good PR. I spoke about Twitter and my students– young 20-somethings, who stay in New Delhi, study media and are net-savvy–had heard of Twitter but they didn't know what it was all about.

This does show that there is a great need to educate young people about the uses of social media. Going back to Mr. Srinivasan, he is running an online poll on the Impact of Social Media on Indian Voters. Only Indian voters are eligible to participate. However, even if you are not an Indian voter, you can still access the website.

Sometime, early this week, I wrote a status update about myself on Facebook and I said I would like to explore Twitter for education and one of my Facebook contacts asked me how I would go about it. I thought that query gave me more food for thought. When I explained about Twitter to my students. I told them that it was a microblogging service where you could post updates about what you were doing in 140 characters. I also told them that you could follow other peoples' updates and that you could update others. The first question that five students asked in unison was: What's the use of following other peoples' updates? Why should anyone follow you? Those were pertinent questions. I explained the advantages to them. Then it made some sense to them.

Speaking about this Facebook friend, who asked me how I could use Twitter for education. I would like to be brief here and I would follow up with future posts which would demonstrate how Twitter could be used for education. Let us take an example. Let us speak about language teaching. However, one could form a limited Twitter group with students / speakers who are second language learners of English. The teacher could use Twitter for writing small phrases and could use the service for explaining the sentence structure used in the English language. The teacher could post an incorrect sentence and ask the students to correct it in real time. The teacher could use a conversational method to teach language.

Now, let us change track a bit. From the domain of education, media, and public relations, where Twitter can be quite powerful, let us speak about what Twitter is doing to the internet these days. John Battelle believes that Twitter is the You Tube of real time search. I thought that was a very powerful idea. Battelle wrote a post yesterday, February 25th. He calls it Twitter=You Tube. He says that You Tube generates more searches than Yahoo and he says that Twitter is community driven and Battelle states that Google wasn't that strong in that part of the media business. I liked the piece and I also liked the way he titled it.

Mercury News also has a very interesting article on the issue. Chris O'Brien wrote How Twitter could be a threat to Google. There is a great online buzz about Twitter and how it can be a transformational idea. We are already in the transformational age now with the election of Barack Obama and everything seems possible these days. Twitter hasn't made a penny yet and it suffered from a major PR disaster recently when some famous accounts were compromised. Figures tell me that Twitter has six million users and that a search function, http://search.twitter.com is growing rapidly.

The co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have already sold a business to Google: Can you guess which one? They sold: Blogger. The same blogger that I am using right now to write this post. Twitter is based in San Francisco and is known as a microblogging service. O'Brien feels that the way Twitter has developed shows that it can do to Google, exactly what Microsoft did to IBM years ago. He feels that this is the way Goliaths are beaten. Twitter has already refused a $500 million offer from Facebook.

I am sure there will be more action in the near future. I wanted this post to focus on Twitter and to show how social media has developed. I would follow up with related posts soon.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, please go to www.twitter.com/roomynaqvy

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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is considered to be the 'holy grail' of online marketing. Some folks admit to being a bit confused about SEO methods. That's understandable. There are so many companies online offering the 'hottest new thing', that an online marketer should expect to be confused.

Many of the e-books available on the subject are either just re-hashed SEO tactics from someone else, whose e-book you also bought, or they're already outdated. Who can a marketer trust these days? You can trust me, that's who.

Why trust what I share with you about SEO? Because after all, I'm no “SEO guru.” I'm just anther web writer who's had the good fortune to learn about SEO from folks that've been doing it right for years themselves. There's no trickery intending to fool web-crawlers (spiders), nor do I use incentives traffic (junk), and there's no voodoo involved. The only voodoo is that voodoo that you do. I've no magic SEO bullet to sell you. All I'd hope for is you share this page on good SEO practices with others by linking here.

Basic SEO works just fine on its own. Basic SEO begins on your site and very few services can offer as effective a service as they might claim. Some are truly good, but even in those cases, website owners are dependant upon the systems that those services use.

So . . . Will you teach me the SEO Shuffle, Don?

You're durn skippy I will. SEO practices are so easy to do that within just setting up a few pages you'll be doing these like they're second nature. So pay attention. There's an SEO test at the end.

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number one:

Find the right keywords that people search for-

Let's say for example, that your website is one of so many that are on the topic of weight loss. Do you think consumers using Google.com are always searching for the exact term “weight loss”? Probably not. So, how can you know exactly which keywords searchers are using?

It's easy. My friends at http://www.Spacky.com offer you the power of entering your topic, then their security code, and Voila! You now see that while the term “weight loss” enjoyed 13.6 million inquiries last month on Google.com alone. But as you scroll down you notice the word “weight” by itself had 24.9 million search engine inquiries.

What does this mean to you? Well now you know to use “weight” as your primary keyword, and “weight loss” as your secondary keyword. From the list you're probably able to find a decently-searched third keyword.

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number two:

Distribute those keywords properly-

Now you know your ideal primary, secondary, and even a tertiary keyword to use in the text on your page. The first place you want to use them is in the title, and as briefly as possible, but twice if you can do it without looking like you're just being redundant. Also, make sure your primary is used first, secondary second, and any others next. Place them as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

Throughout the body of your text you'll want to mention all of your keywords twice in the opening paragraph, at least twice in the closing paragraph, and every 50 or so words throughout.

The ideal percentages are as follows: Your primary keyword should occur from 2% to 5% of all of the words in the piece. Your secondary keywords will fall between 2% and 4%. Do not place your keywords at such a frequency that you exceed 5% under any circumstances as spiders will see them as spam. You might read other folks saying the thresh-hold is 6%, but that's simply not true. Please learn from my past mistakes and save yourself the hassle.

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number three:

Double-check the placement of your keywords-

There's another tool I'll share with you today here. It's called http://www.textalyser.net. All you do is copy and paste the body of your text into their “textalizer” and submit. Textalyser sends your piece through its process and shows you 1) the number of recognized words (words like a, as, in, is, off, out, of, the, and so on are ignored), 2) what percentages they're at, and 3) complexity factors, readability, and such.

If your text work is way too high of a percentage (even .1%), add a few other words to bring it down a hair. If your keywords aren't high enough then just add them in a few key places as long as the piece still reads naturally.

Readability and complexity are also factors of good SEO. But the only thing that controls them is the language skills of the author. If you're not a native English speaker I'd recommend you catch a few movies in English and study the slang, the accents, and even a few pieces of current popular music.

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number four:

Edit again-

This is the part that's only enjoyed by those who've seen the benefit of doing it and making money from doing it. Believe it or not, SEO isn't just about percentages of keywords, it's about a lot of things. A major factor in good SEO practices is proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (See? The teacher told you you'd need this someday. Were you listening?)

Minor punctuation typos have much less overall affect as do misspelled words. There's a rumor going around that you can purposefully misspell words to be found by folks looking up words they've misspelled themselves.

Don't do it! It may be tempting but the annoyance of misspelled words will come back up on you and bite you in the (uh-huh) because of the next tip.

Editing isn't reading. Editing is when you go over your work one word at a time, and one piece of punctuation at a time, to make sure you're well-spelled. It's not as bad as it sounds . . . and even if it is, it's worth it.

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number five:

Ratings/Recommends count too-

Google.com has spiders eternally crawling the web looking not only for text that's delicious to them based upon percentages and all that. But now they're programmed to convey whether a text document is rated high by readers too.

It's the internet's way of knowing if there's a possibility of talent, or popularity amongst readers. Some designers call it Google.com's “last slap in the face,” but that's just a bit unfair to them. Google's job is to insure their advertisers they're getting the maximum return on their advertising dollar possible because of good SEO practices. So the more popular pages will rank higher in the organic search engine results. See how spelling helps you too? Badly misspelled words will not only not get you recommended . . . you'll get “buried.”

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number six:

Update regularly-

Some folks much smarter than I have shared with me that the best thing you can do for an otherwise SEO'd site is to keep it updated with fresh content as often as possible. Google.com's spiders find fresh, updated, unique content delicious, and keeping things fresh will help to keep drawing those spiders your way to communicate your level of SEO practices back to Google.com.

SEO is easy. Just like I said. At first the best SEO practices take a little time to get used to doing . . . but you must! As you continue to grow and learn from practice you'll not only know the “how” but you'll also know the “why” regarding the use of good SEO practices.

Oh. That test on SEO? I just wanted you to pay attention to the information on SEO for your own benefit. Hope you took notes.

Sources:

http://www.spacky.com
http://www.textalyser.net
http://www.Google.com

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