Three Ways to Take Advantage of Twitter for Business

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How can the brand develop relationships with customers?

• @ Replies – any twitter update that begins with a username. The update will appear in that person’s @ replies tab. 
• Mentions - @ replies have merged into Mentions. If your brand appears in a tweet, you’ll find it along Twitter’s sidebar. 
• Following – following allows the brand to subscribe to the tweets of its customers so they’ll appear in your company timeline. 
• Direct Messages (DM) – a DM is a private message, much like a tweet, that has a limit of 140 characters. 

How does the feature amplify the brand’s value proposition?

• Tweet – a tweet is a 140 character update that answers this question: how can I make my customer’s life easier/better? 
• Retweet – a feature that allows you to re-share what someone else has already tweeted. The RT convention is a symbol of attribution. 
• Shortened URLs – since tweets are limited to 140 characters, shortened urls let brands direct followers to their content. 
• Permalinks – the unique url of each and every tweet. These can be mailed, im – or even retweeted. 
• SMS – customers can choose to get your tweets via their phone by text message. 

How do brands find and aggregate conversations using the service?

• Trending – popular conversations on twitter 
• Hashtags (#) – used to aggregate tweets around topics. Tweets can be sorted and organized via hashtag as well. 
• Search – method of retrieving indexed tweets via twitter’s search tool. 
• Favorites – the ability to mark or save a favorite tweet. 
• Persistent RSS Feeds – the RSS feed for a twitter search can be used with a feed reader like Google Reader. 
• Favorites RSS – the RSS feed, like as above, for your favorite tweets. - http://www.twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_id].rss

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Los Angeles SEO: Top 5 Google SEO Ranking Factors

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It's fairly comment to find clients who've worked with SEO firms in the past that really didn't understand all the factors that go into determining where a website ranks in the SERPs. Some people think it's merely a matter of stuffing your title tags and meta data full of random keywords and sitting back. 

A hint: Most of SEO is in the background and you'll never see it unless you look at the source code of a website.

By reading industry blogs, practicing Los Angeles SEO and Internet Marketing since the mid-2000's, we've gathered a massing of data about SEO techniques and have shortened a 5 inch binder full of information down to the top 5 most important Google SEO in LA ranking factors you should be implementing on all of your websites.

Age of Domain

This sometimes can't be helped, especially if you just started a business, but domain age is incredibly important to the search engines. It means you're established, and by association are more trust-worthy. If you have the cash, you can purchase a domain name that's been around a while (for a few grand). Otherwise...you've got a long road ahead of you.

Content, Content, Content.

Content is king, content is king! Hail to the king of Los Angeles California SEO. If you've got a beautiful website about Shoes, and all your content is about the great sweater you've got for sale, you can say goodbye to rankings for Shoes forever. The jist of the matter is this: write great, unique content using targeted keywords spread out naturally in your paragraphs. Never ever write solely for a search engine spider. It's a great way to lose customers and get black-listed at the same time.

Hidden Tags, Images and Internal Linking

Ok yes, this is three in one, but they're all important! A lot of SEO is unseen or brushed off by the human eye, but spider-bots read them all the time. Hidden tags include Title Tags, H1-H6, Alts, no-index, no-follow, etc. The most important of these are the Title Tags, H1 tags and Alt tags. They tell the spiders and therefore the search engines, what your website is about. Images? Important? Yes! Make very sure, when you upload an image to your website, that you include your keywords in the image name. Don't ever leave it the 'istock number' or the 'straight from the camera' name or even worse... header.jpg. As for Internal Linking, not only does linking internally show your visitors where to go, it tells the spiders where to go as well. Keep the clickable images to a minimum and make sure you incorporate the LEAST amount of flash as possible.

Keywords!!!

Keywords make the world go round. Without keywords, having an optimized website is worthless. Make sure you're doing your research and giving each specific page it's designated keyword based on the content and topic of each page. Example: If your page is about web design, don't talk about graphic design. Don't name your images graphic design related. 

Inbound & Outbound Links

Inbound links are better known as backlinks. Think of them like votes for your website. The key to building great inbound backlinks is to not BUY them. Develop them naturally and more links will follow! Outbound links are links from your website to others. If they're not relevant, don't bother.

For more information on Southern California SEO, Los Angeles Marketing, California Web Design and California Graphic Design, call us for a FREE skype consultation at 213.545.6697.

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Los Angeles Creative Marketing: Rules for Typography

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As a Los Angeles Graphic Design Firm, we deal with all aspects of graphic and web design; everything from ease of usability to SEO website design to visual hierarchy. One subject that our team of design professionals is especially skilled at is typography; something that can often be misused in everyday advertisements. Not sure what typography is? Watch this short video introduction by the Vancouver Film School:

As you can see several elements are utilized in the creation and use of typography: kearning, leading, serifs, san-serifs etc. (A good way to remember the difference between serif and san-serif is to know that “sans” means without.) To expand your typographic knowledge here are few rules to live by when you sit down to design:

Don’t leave widows and orphans bereft on a page
Widow: When a paragraph leaves fewer than seven characters on the last line.
Orphan: When the last line of a paragraph won’t fit at the bottom of a column and must end itself at the top of the next column.

-These elements are not only visually unappealing, it also makes it more difficult in the readers’ mind to process. Like
this.

Make only one space between sentences
Use only one space after periods, colons, exclamation points, question marks etc. Forget what they taught you about double spacing in school.

Dashes
Don’t substitute a hyphen for a dash. Hyphens are fine for word continuation (which should be avoided if possible as well), dashes should denote a break in the sentence – just like that.
Hypen: -

Dash: –

Avoid Underlining
Use italics instead of underlining, it appears more professional for noting the names books, movies, magazines and newspapers. It’s also best to italicize the space before an italicized word.

Kerning
Adjust the spacing between letters according to your visual perception– optical kerning.
A great trick for perfect kerning: turn the letters upside down so that your brain is not distracted by your ability to read the word. By turning the letters upside down you will be able to identify the negative space between each letter to make sure it is perfectly kerned.

Tabs and Indents
Use tabs and first-line indents properly. The space bar should never be used to align text.

Paragraph Distinction
If you chose to indent the first line of a paragraph don’t add a space between paragraphs too. It needs to be one or the other.

Leading
Keep your linespacing consistent. It’s best to tighten up the leading for text that has all caps or few ascenders and descenders.

Serif & Sans Serif
Serif type is more readable for body text while sans–serif type is more legible and is best used for headlines.

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Los Angeles SEO: Google Image Search Enhanced

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Recently, Google launched a new search feature called 'Search by Image'. While experimenting with the feature, we defines 3 places where Google's search by image has a real advantage over traditional ways to find link building opportunities.

What is Search by Image? You can use images (either the url or uploaded) as your search term! The goal of Search by Image is to point you at websites that are related to that image. You can find more at the Google Blog.

Get Background on Industry Influencers

As we've often discussed, pinpointing the mass internet user's interests using them to creative connections, is an amazing way to get in influential people and businesses radar. If you do this correctly, using Twitter, Facebook or Los Angeles SEO Marketing Agency, this can produce exposure and links to your website.

Not surprisingly, the most successful SEO consultants, are also the best at personal online branding. We've written a post or two about making your brand more consistent online and offline. Being very consistent in your use of logos in blogging websites, social media and in your marketing materials is extremely important.

When testing the new Google features using a our logo, I found an enormous amount of image results attached to comments and similar images (Dontcha love how BMW pops in there?).

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This also gave us a view of all the blogs we've commented on in the past few months. If used on a competitor, it could give you a distinct advantage because you can filter results by simply using their logo. 

Identifying Link Building Opportunities

Search for Popular Guest Posters! In the SEO community, Ann Smarty is THE person that is most synonymous with guest posting on blogs. Not simply because her over her website, myblogguest.com, but because she's a prolific guest poster in her own right. Regardless of this, she's very good at maintaining her personal brand. So using Google Search by Image, you can search her profile image to look for guest posting opportunities, and link building opportunities on top of that.

Find Coverage That Didn't Result in a Link

Another great technique to find PR opportunities is to mine for stock CEO photos and participation that didn't result in a link for that company. Search branded logos and photos to find great pages where companies and employees are getting spotlighted.

Try it with any Fortune 500 Company and you'll find significant RP presence that can result in you getting a backlink.

Another way you can use Search By Image is to mine for press coverage and participation in offline activities that didn't result in a link. Searching by brand logos and "stock" CEO photos are a great way to find pages where a company or employee is getting highlighted.

For more information on Google Image Search, contact us at 847.537.0067 or visit us online at the following:

- Los Angeles Marketing Agency

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