Shop Local, Help the Economy

Shop Local!

Think about the last time you watched your children play a little league game or soccer match. Those sponsors on the back of the team jerseys probably didn’t say Wal-Mart or Target. In the hustle and bustle that has become the holiday season we love and dread, it is important to remember that local businesses support the local community year round. Whether it is a girl-scout troop or a block party to support breast cancer, local business owners need and deserve your support this year. Local businesses on Devine Street have banned together this year in downtown Columbia SC time and time again to raise money for charities like the Ronald McDonald House, March of Dimes, and the American Amputee Soccer Association. More notably, when you see the name of a local business on the back of your child’s jersey remember these businesses have not had the money to give the last few years like the big corporate giants have.   The Southern Baked Candle Company is one of those local businesses. Located on Devine Street in downtown Columbia, this once mom and pop shop has stayed true to their humble beginnings. Always the first to donate their time, money, or even candles The Southern Baked Candle Company has a firm grasp on what it takes to be an active part of their community. “I can’t help it when a kid comes through the door with a clipboard I just ask what is your name and how much!” – Debey Hancock owner In an age of economic uncertainty it is also important to remember to keep the money in your community. Shopping at the big stores sends your money elsewhere, not in the local community where it belongs. In short support local business and help your local economy at the same time.

Social Media Rules for Business Owners

by Josh Mangum of Townsquare Interactive Every day it seems I have to de-friend a business page on Facebook. Twitter is so much worse. The reason is that business owners break a lot of the rules of social media so as an aid here are a few guidelines to increase your fan base and retention of likes: Rule #1 Be tactful. DO NOT TRY TO SELL on social media sites. With the obvious exception of restaurants nobody wants to hear about your specials all day. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this question: When was the last time a new customer came in because of a Facebook post? In fact what you will find is that in most cases these are returning loyal customers and you are cannibalizing your own sales. Rule #2 Be Interesting A generic post every week about the safety features of a certain product is not interesting. In fact I suggest to business owners that about half of their posts should not be directly related to their own business. Shares and likes come from interesting pictures, videos, and by asking real questions. Next time you want to post something try creating a poll instead, make it silly (stay professional) you will be surprised at how well it is received. Another tip, if you are a business with interesting pictures to share everyday stop posting them to Facebook and join the Pinterest bandwagon. Rule #3 Be brief STOP POSTING 10 TIMES A DAY!! This is one of the most cited reasons people un-like a business. One post a day is almost too much for a local businesses. Try to focus on one social media site a day as far as posts/updates go. Remember it’s not all about the posts. Go and view your fans’ pages or twitter feeds, and like some photos or retweet some of their interesting posts. People appreciate the human side of social media and you will develop much more brand loyalty when people feel you are actually engaged and not just marketing to them. Rule #4 Be Real Golden Rule, do no harm, say it however you want just do it. People are smarter than you think and they are constantly dodging falsehoods online. Don’t add your company to the list or you will find yourself with less fans than yesterday. Rule #5 Be efficient You have a business to run, employees to pay, schedules to make, orders to fill, bills to pay etc. If you don’t have time to run your social media pages then don’t. Instead, outsource the management of your pages. If you have an employee, possibly one that watches the front desk, and they have spare time during the day ask them to help you with the pages. Create the pages yourself or with them and then ad them as an administrator, that way if they ever leave you won’t lose your social media pages. But before you do make sure they read rules 1-4!!! www.mangumseo.com www.mangumseo.com/social_media

The Weakest Link = YOU!!!

Just a few things to know about Link Building... Like it or not, link building has been and still is big, big business. Doing it well takes a lot of time and resources, which means that many webmasters/site owners can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Many agencies that handle other aspects of search engine marketing want to outsource it simply because of the massive resource drain. That’s great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and really have no idea what they’re doing. As link building is considered an offpage tactic, to actually sell yourself as a link builder, you don’t have to do very much. People are desperate for help. However, it’s better to build no links than it is to embark upon a link building campaign that is full of nothing but spam that you will pay for twice: once when you put it up there, once when you have to remove it. If you’re shopping for link builders, make sure that the one you go with knows most of the following. 1.  Why Links Matter There’s no way to describe that quickly here but if you don’t know why links are important, you shouldn’t be building them alone. Links are how users and search engine spiders (Google bot) move around the internet and they give clues to what the linked-to content is about. 2.  HTML Code For Text & Image Links For a good reference you can visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp but generally, it’s pretty easy stuff: 3.  How To Read A Robots.txt File These can be tricky and you’ll se a lot of robots files that are coded incorrectly, so if you’re unsure of how to read one, there are a few good validators that are online. (I usually gravitate towards http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.) Robots files are always named robots.txt and are always found at the root, which means you can always access them at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If one doesn’t exist, well, you just won’t see one. That’s not a problem, but if one is there, make sure it’s valid. Here’s the code you want to really watch out for: User-agent: * Disallow: / That tells the search engines to go away when they show up. People commonly use this when they don’t have a development/test environment so that they can code live but not have the site get indexed. That’s ok if it’s how you want to work, but remember to remove that exclusion when you do want the engines to index you. If your site has recently disappeared, check the robots.txt immediately. You can also block engines using the method listed below. 4.  How To Check For Robots Blocking Outside Of The Robots.txt File There are some intricacies involved with using this method so it’s a good idea to read what Google has to say about blocking robots here. If your site has just disappeared and you have checked the robots.txt file and it’s all fine and dandy, check to see if this line is in your code: 5.  How To Use WordPress As one of the most common blogging platforms, you should familiarize yourself with it. It’s quite user-friendly in my opinion but there are tons of tutorials out there. However, like with many things, it’s something you can learn best by actually setting up a site and using it. If you don’t want to use WordPress, that’s fine – just learn how to set up a basic site on a popular platform. Here’s why I think this is so important for link building: once you are intimately involved in the innards of a site, you do start to think more critically about SEO, content creation, and usability. Those are all aspects of marketing that aren’t always involved with link building, but they should be. 6.  How To Do A Link Audit Don’t wait to audit your links until you get a warning letter from Google. Check and see what’s there right now. There are some great free tools that will give you a list of your back links so use them. You won’t always get all the functionality that you need from free tools and free versions of tools so if you’re doing a decent amount of link building, you should probably invest in at least one major paid link tool. Grab your data and start to analyze it whether you can export it or you have to copy and paste it. You need to know how to look at your profile as a whole, break it down into different parts (like percentages of sitewides, money keywords, etc.) and actually look at the sites in the report and evaluate whether or not that link is a good one.