So you’ve setup a YouTube account, you are posting pictures to Flickr and have a Facebook account as well, Great!!! The question is are you optimizing your social media to be found?

What I mean by that is it’s great you are participating in social media but you need to optimize your social media accounts and content to increase your find-ability. How do you do that?

Here are a couple of tips for the three social outlets I mentioned earlier.

• YouTube, after you upload your video’s make sure you are use your keywords in your title, description and tags.
• Flickr - In your profile description use keywords to describe yourself/company and link to your website. Use keywords in your photo file names.
• Facebook - Make sure your business page is set to public. Link to your company website. Create a custom tab with keyword rich content. (Search for FBML if you don’t know how)

Finally every bit of content you create has a option to input meta data, make sure you’re doing that before you upload anywhere on the internet.

I don’t know if social media is the be all end all but it’s here and if you’re going to play, play smart.

This is a test of Google Indexing speed. I have added this post at 3:26 pm CST and will post a response when it has been indexed by Google. Remember this is only a test, please try this with your own site.

Since it’s the week before Thanksgiving that means Christmas is upon us and you should have started or be prepared to start a Holiday PPC campaign. I thought I would give a few tips that are the basis to all of the Holiday PPC campaigns we run for clients.

Keyword Strategy:

• Seasonal Keywords - Look for keywords that are unique to Christmas such as Christmas gifts, Xmas gift, Holiday parties, etc. Don’t forget this is a holiday season for many religions, not just Christians.
• Longtail Keywords - While researching your seasonal terms don’t forget the longtail versions. People searching for Christmas gifts may extend that to tie gifts for Christmas. Remember longtail keywords typically convert at a high rate.

Ad Copy Strategy:

• Keep the holiday season mindset when developing ad copy. Use terms that relate to Christmas, Hanukkah and typical holiday speak like “Tis the season”. Don’t forget many shoppers wait until the last minute so if you offer last minute or overnight delivery this is a great time to let people know.
• Sales - Using the term Holiday Sale can be very effective as can be catering to the early shopper with terms like Beat the rush or Order early. Providing a discount to early orders is an option to keep open as well. “Order by Dec 10, Get 20% off!

Landing Page Strategy:

• Holiday look and feel - You’ve enticed the customer to click on your holiday ad so keep them in the spirit by giving your landing pages a holiday look and feel. Maybe it’s a color scheme or adding snowflakes or using holiday lingo like “HO, HO, HO - Welcome!” or all three, keeping the holiday theme going will enhance the visitors experience.
• Expectations - If you are promoting a product that is very popular you want to keep the visitor informed as it relates to stock and delivery. The same is true for last minute shoppers, posting the drop-dead cutoff date for shipping to arrive before Christmas is not only informative but good customer service.

2009 has been a tough year and this holiday season could be make up for a lot of lost revenue. Take more time than normal and put some effort into creating your Holiday PPC Campaign and may the season be a blessed one to you.

If you’re looking for professional pay per click management we are Google Adwords Certified and Microsoft aD Excellence members and welcome the opportunity to speak with you.

The Info Group recently received Company Certification status from Microsoft adExcellence. Three employees are required to successfully manage a paid search campaign through Microsoft adCenter and pass the adExcellence test. Mark & Andy Stone and Scott Mattiza all completed the certification process with flying colors.

I finally took a few days away from everything and got my Google Qualified Advertising Professional certification.

To get this recognition I:
• Accepted the terms of the Google Qualified Advertising Professional program.
• Managed at least one AdWords account in a master account for 90 days.
• Built and maintained the Google Qualified Advertising Professional 90-day spend requirement.
• Passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam. (I won’t reveal my score but suffice it to say I could make the honor roll)

The next step is Microsoft adExcellence certification. Yahoo has discontinued their ad professional certifications.

On occasion I like to do keyword searches as they relate to our business and in particular the market we target which is regional/local and I’m always amazed at the sales pitches from other SEM agencies but more so from advertising agencies who are selling search marketing services.

What amazes me is to read their sales pitch on how important search marketing is to a company yet when you do a search for keywords relating to SEO or search engine marketing these agencies don’t come up within the first 4 or 5 pages of organic results. Instead where you find them is paid search only, this ought to be a clue they don’t practice what they preach or don’t have the experience to deliver real results.

This goes to my headline, why would you buy SEM services from a company who can’t do it for themselves? Why would you hire an ad agency for a search engine optimization project when they don’t show up in organic listings? How could you trust they know what they are doing when they have not managed to do it for themselves?

Quite often I’ve taken a sales call and the first words out of the prospects mouth were I searched for SEO Dallas and you guys were in the top listings so I figured if you could do it for yourself you could do it for me.

Anyone can open a Adwords account and start a paid search campaign and anyone can fill up a keyword tag so don’t be fooled by the ad agency who dabbles in search marketing, ask them to prove it. Ask them what keywords they show up for in the organic listings, if they can’t show you lots of front page results tell them to have a nice day. Search marketing is about both organic and paid search not just one or the other.

You wouldn’t hire a car mechanic who couldn’t fix his own car so why would you hire an ad agency who doesn’t show up in the search engines?

The Info Group has partnered with Elkore to create 2StepSite.com a CPA Web Design & Marketing venture. The site offers CPA’s , Accountants and Financial Services Companies the means to create a website they can update at anytime with ease and speed and one that attracts targeted visitors with Search Engine Marketing options for any budget.

“The Yellow Pages are a dying breed, now everyone “Google’s” the service or product they are seeking and Financial Services oriented businesses are no exception.” said Mark Stone, a partner with The Info Group. “So, if you’re not online you limit your opportunities to compete in todays business environment.” he went on to say. “Finally, Elkore always delivers superior web design projects and when you combine that with our experience in online marketing I know this partnership will deliver results to CPA’s, Accountants and Financial Services companies anywhere.”

CPA, Accountants and Financial Services companies 2StepSite.com offers web design and marketing packages starting from as little as $159 a month.

With 2/3 of the search market Google certainly has acquired enough user data to understand trends, patterns and the like and it appears now that Google is using that data to focus ads based on queries. This story by Saul Hansell of The New York Times describes some interesting findings in Google search results as of late.

Apparently Google is using visitor search queries to push relevant ads. The example given in the story is a visitor who might search for diving and then do another search for vacation would be shown ads for diving trips. So what’s different than the diving company who has ads displaying via Adwords? This shows that Google is displaying ads based on behaviour not what keywords were purchased. Now that is focused.

Of course privacy concerns abound and we’ve yet to see how that will play out but if that issue can be safely bedded advertising will take a step forward.

It’s not a surprise that Google made gains in every metric of the report released by Efficient Frontier or that it is still the dominate search engine when it comes to volume of searches but it is a nice surprise to read how healthy search engine marketing is despite the downturn of the economy. Read the press release or download the report.

I saw the first upgrade to a clients Analytics account last night and couldn’t wait to log in today to see if I had been dreaming. Business owners everywhere have just had their dreams answered when it comes to tracking your online marketing efforts. Whether you participate in SEO organic marketing or SEM paid search marketing or Interactive Marketing or … get the point, Google Analytics has taken the effort out of understanding how your marketing dollars are working for you.

When you login the improvements are immediately noticeable with an upgraded layout and graphical look from the charts which include much more interactive information on mouse-over to the overall information available on the page. For ecommerce and goal capturing users, the ability to understand what keywords and what campaigns are working has been taken to a new level. Help features are prominent and organized by 4 main categories instead of the single help link at the top of the page in the previous version. (you can still view the old version while in beta)

If you participate in online marketing and are not using a statistics package, you have no excuse now! As with almost everything Google does, Analytics is free. This version is a very nice step forward and I guess I should stop wondering why Google shares are what they are.