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One of the truly innovative things you can do to update your website is to add features that allow you to automatically update your social media feeds. This eliminates the need for the people who handle your Internet marketing to update your social media feeds individually after making an update to your website.

The Concept

Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and other social media giants do have tools that work with them and that allow you to update them regularly. In fact, there are tools available that allow you to update your social media sites on a schedule. Your Internet marketing people, using these tools, could make several updates for these feeds and schedule them to deploy automatically.This can save a great deal of time and money and increase the return on investment you get from your website. It also allows you to do something very important, given the fact that many social media sites are coming up with various payment schemes for companies that use them for largely advertising purposes.

Redirect the Traffic

The value of having a Facebook profile and a Twitter account for a business has been discussed endlessly in many different media outlets. This tends to underrate the value of actually having a real website. As was said previously, many social media outlets are finding ways to charge business customers for the advertising that they do that was formerly free. Your website is something that you control and, of course, you don't have to pay for advertising on your own website.Integrating your website updates with your social media feeds provides you with a way to direct traffic to your website from those social media sites. Provided you have a good website, you may be able to retain some of those people and have them start visiting your site preferentially, rather than looking for your Facebook profile or other social media presence.

Add or Not?

There's really no reason not to update a website with these tools. They're far too easy to use and far too economical to pass up. They also allow you to, perhaps ironically, enjoy a bit of freedom from being completely dependent on using social networks. Because you can handle this directly from your website, you don't have to expend the extra time involved in going through all of the different interfaces, making updates and, on top of all of that, trying to keep the updates consistent across many different social media networks.

What are QR Codes? Although not yet fully adopted by the mainstream world yet, QR (or quick response) codes have seen a dramatic rise in usage and very well may be the new way that companies decide to give customers information on products. For those uninitiated, QR codes are those big squares you may have seen in the bottom corners of movie posters, under your drink on a coaster at your favorite restaurant or possibly next to various products at your local supermarket. With any smartphone armed with a QR code scanner (which are a free download on any app store). In the future, an advertisement may not be just a message and a picture, but an interactive environment with unlimited possibilities. What you can do with these handy bar codes may surprise you. What can I do with QR codes?Now that I’ve (hopefully) piqued your interest into QR codes, what kind of information can a QR code hold? In the end, it all depends on how powerful your end-users reader is. Below is a list of things any QR reader can do and some notions on how your business may be able to utilize QR codes:You can open URLs in a browserProbably the most common way to use a QR code, using it as a link to your company’s website or blog is one method, but think harder; what about a specially tailored site or campaign customized to the demographic of people that is likely to scan your code? Be creative with your site (and maybe poach a few other ideas from this blog) to make something truly unique that will give your target market a memorable experience. Use QR codes to display hidden/secret textThe simplest of tasks you could ask of a QR code may seem like the type of command you may want to skip over, but it could have a few uses if you think creatively. Perhaps hiding your code with a special password on it that when given provides a special deal at your establishment.  Help people in setting up system alertsDo you have a weekly special or special event coming up? Why not create a QR code that will automatically set up a reminder in your clients calender on their phone?Collecting contact information (including vCards)Having a networking event or party? A QR code would be a simple way to have guests register or sign in to an event. Do you want to grab everybodies contact info to send thank-you cards or a newsletter?Reconsider the whole “business-card-in-a-fish-bowl” raffle contest with a digital QR code version that can easily be imported right into your company’s mailing list. Create a QR code for sending email or text messages (SMS)Give customers a great way to let their friends know where they are, possibly with daily specials or a password for special deals or promotions.Create a fun E-card that guests and clients can share with their friends.Use QR codes as a means of making geolocation easierIs your customer lost? Help them out by pinning your address into their phone’s GPS with a QR code. From there, give them directions to your other locations, affiliates, or just the quickest route home.Use a QR code as a simple way for customers to check-in to your establishment or to show proof that they went to a secondary location.Easily Connect to WiFi using a QR codeUse an easy-to-find QR code to grant WiFi access to mobile users in a quick, interactive way that can makes remembering clunky passwords a thing of the past.Where can I get a QR code? By googling “QR codes” you can find a litany of sites that can generate you a QR code free of charge. If you plan on using your QR code for a larger, more focused campaign, you can pay to have a QR code generated that will record statistics and demographic information. However, if you are too lazy to Google the aforementioned keywords, here are two sites of merit:http://www.qrstuff.com/http://qrcode.kaywa.com/http://bronto.com/blog/mobile-marketing/7-best-practices-qr-code-success#.T-jzruJWqs1Info for programming codes to do the previous functions should be able to be found on the above sites, if not a great resource I used for this article can also help you with some of the programming as well: http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/qr-codes-uri-schemes/What are some creative ways you can (or have) thought of to use QR codes in the ways mentioned above? We would love to see some examples.Find this article useful? Check out these blogs:Creating Relationships With Your Customers On The Mobile Web.What Is NFC? NFC And The New Google Wallet.

This article is meant to be an elementary glimpse into the world of digital marketing; there are many avenues to explore in the realm of marketing on the Internet, but one of the biggies is SEO. Below you will find some of the basic tactics and tricks anyone can do to immediately help with their site's Page Rank (the placement of your site in Google searches). SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of sprinkling specific commonly used words (or “keywords”) into your websites in order to (hopefully) have your page rank higher in Google’s search engine. To find what words you need to use you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Begin by punching in words you think people will use when searching for your company’s trade in Google.Take note of the most commonly used words or phrases, these are your “keywords”.

1) Plug-In Your Keywords!
The trick here is to not use them too much, Google can spot these and will consider your website spam and not post it at all; which is definitely not what you want. Be crafty and use multiple different keywords to plug into your website copy. Think of it as a game of Sudoku, but with words.

2) Write A Blog!
‍A blog is a great place to show your company culture, its work, and interests. It is also a page on your website that can be updated constantly, which makes it like steroids for SEO. Keep your keywords in mind when writing your articles and do a keyword search for each blog submission.

3) Have Title Tags (H1) Tags!
‍See how this article is written in numbered/bullet points? Do the same. Google loves numbered/bulleted content with heavy SEO keywords. Not to mention it will help you layout and format your blogs and articles.

4) Share Links!
‍Network on Facebook and Twitter, share links with your clients and partners. The more sites that link with your page, the higher your website will appear in Google’s listings. Possibly adding a widget to your page to add a Twitter feed to your main page will also generate links and expand your traffic and page rank much in the same way I mentioned having a blog would.

5) The "Secret Image Tag"
Also known as an “alt tag”, this nifty little SEO trick is a quite simple one that will generate links and traffic to your site based on the Google Image Search function. These are the tags that tell what a .gif or .jpg is. By going into your website's code and finding your images (marked with an image description, likely .jpg or .gif), you can add what's called an alt tag to give the image a description. You don't have to do any complex HTML coding. Here is an example of what your ALT tag should look like:<img src="images/services-pic.jpg" alt="XYZ company's website optimization services" width="100" height="78" />It is a good idea to add alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. Not only will alt tags increase your image SEO on the image search, but it will also produce some SEO for your overall site; granted you used those keywords we talked about earlier, but once again, don’t overdo it with the keywords. Google will know and flog your site by dropping it into the depths of its page ranks.

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What other tricks or techniques would your small business like to learn about? Marketing? Design? Social Media?

Whatever it is, drop me a line. mattd@mediacontour.com