Retailers believe that social media is a great way to keep in touch with customers. Videos, customer reviews, blogs and personalization are the most important features retailers went for in 2009. What is happening in my opinion is that businesses are finding new ways to offer an alternative buying experience to offline purchasing. These aren’t things associated with customers saving money or time because of online purchase, but are more related to the pleasure of interacting with the media which can be somehow different and joyful compared to the pleasure of interacting with a salesperson. For instance, a well designed promotional video will be able to create a totally different feeling from that of a salesman pitching in a store. This channel can, by itself, offer new sales opportunities that couldn’t have been realized otherwise. I also believe that this sector is going to know serious transformations as retailers find new ways to arouse customer feelings. Somehow, consumers are looking for new ways to have pleasure in buying. Buying is becoming an increasingly personal experience and the increasing need for interaction between customers and suppliers is there and is real. Therefore, expect greater role of interactive media in online retailers in the years to come.

Of course, interactive media is closely related to social media as a tool for viral propagation of new experiences. Social media have proven to be effective in creating brand awareness through word-of-mouth. Therefore, promotional messages are no more communicated exclusively through the firm’s website. Messages will propagate through social networks and will have a more subtle association with the brand by itself. Again, the point here is to confer a new experience to the customer who is approached even when doing the very act of socializing.

In line with this philosophy of multichannel sales, retailers have spent considerable effort in redesigning their websites. This is an attempt to generate more sales and to acquire new customers. It shows that there is strong consensus around the importance of customer experience and online sales as e-commerce companies try to use cutting edge techniques to stimulate new feeling in customers. These methods have shown to be quite fruitful as last year online sales results show that more people are spending online.

Finally, local search has also gained in importance. Business have shown interest in having a better presence on online maps. Of course, this has to do with a) higher rate of online traffic coming from mobile devices, and b) a change in customer behavior when it comes to searching for services.

The change in customer behavior is very related to the concept of economic gains associated with online purchasing. If it is true that, due to increasing returns of scale, online retailer can offer the same product for cheaper than offline retailers, the opposite is true for services which have a very geographical nature. With customers looking for services in their proximity, it becomes essential for business to have a presence on all location-based services.

My view is that these statistics are showing a trend where the Internet and especially social media are supplanting traditional media.

Location-aware services

The first thing to consider is that local SEO is not only about search engines: it is also about maps and other location-aware web applications. Think of integrating with Google Maps (including Place Pages), Bing Maps and Yahoo Local but also a whole bunch of local business listings and 411-like services like Yelp, Canada 411, Superpages, FourSquare and Gowalla.

One way crawlers relate webpages to locations, is through the address. So your address should appear in a couple of pages (ex: Contact and About) in a consistent way so the crawler ‘has enough evidence’ that it is your address. Use a standard format like the following:

Company name

Street Address

City,State/Province,Zip/Postal

Phone WITH AREA CODE

Part of your local SEO task is to make sure your website is registered with your company address. This is because search engines give some importance to the registrar’s address. If it is the same as the address that shows in your website, then there ‘is a match for the crawler’.

The usual SEO stuff

Your title, description and H-tags are still very importance in local SEO. The difference is that you should have location or city information in them. In other words, what you are saying to the crawler is that “this page is about this business that does thins thing in this city”.

We all know about the importance of backlinks and how to get them. When it comes to local SEO, your backlinks should contain location information in anchor text for better results. This is the same logic as for tags inside your webpages.

It wasn’t long ago when Variety.com announced their decision to charge fees for some of their content. Recently, a survey conducted by Nielsen Wired shows that consumers are willing to pay for online content. Most interesting of all are findings about social communities and blogs where 28% and 20% of consumers have paid or would consider paying for those types of content respectively. Taking into consideration that the public doesn’t always understand the value of social media, this is an interesting finding indeed.

It all looks like people are willing to spend more than just their ISP subscription fees. In fact, 2009 has seen a rise in e-commerce spending compared to 2008 which was a better economic year. What it means is that people see their Internet connection the same way as they see gas for their car: it will get them to the store, but you still have to pay for a product. This is good news as the potential of e-commerce are great and will have beneficial effect to other sectors of the economy.

As a result of this new reality, brick and mortar SMBs that haven’t started with having an online shop should be seriously thinking of doing so. Of course, there is one thing that a brick and mortar stores can do that an website will not be able to do: human contact. But except a decrease in the number of customers who can ‘afford’ to spend on such ‘luxury’ as human contact. Therefore, businesses should think of having a virtual store as well as their physical store to stay competitive in today’s fast moving market.

First of all, Facebook is not going to lose members. Therefore, the critical mass that is needed to become number one website is there to stay and will only get bigger. Second, certain features of Facebook offer benefits that other conventional means of communication do not offer. Therefore, Facebook is changing the way people keep in touch with each other, gradually supplanting traditional communication channels in the process.

So if Facebook will have more users who will spend more time on the website, then it will soon have more traffic than Google. This was somehow expected as major marketing analysts expect a rise of marketing spending on Facebook and other mainstream social media.

Naturally, link building becomes an important part of SEO tasks. In this post, I would like to describe the most common techniques used to get backlinks to a website. The link building list here is the result of surveying some of the most important SEO articles and blogs. Since I didn’t want to enumerate the totality of techniques that are described in these posts, I chose those that come most often and that are part of the basics of link building. After all, this is a starter kit and the point here is not to become a link building guru.

Link building techniques

• Directories: This is one the most popular way to get backlinks. Directories are websites that classify and list other websites. Of course, not all directories aren’t good. The most popular and selective is DMOZ and being indexed there is always a good thing. Now, you have to be careful about the directory you pick. Some of them aren’t really well ranked and being listed there is going to do more harm than good to your ranking.
• Webrings: these are a collection of websites that are linked together in a circular structure. When you join a webring, you will have to add a link to the previous and next website of the ring. Again you have to be careful what you link to here. If you link to a spammy website or a spammy website links to you, you will end up with more remorse than rewards.
• Link exchange: The point here is to contact webmasters and ask for having a link to your web page. Of course, nothing is free in this world and common courtesy is to give a link back. A few principle of good mannerism are needed here to make the effort be profitable. It is very easy to offend someone you never talked to before. As a rule of thumb, give before you take.
• Paid links: Whether you pay a directory, blogger or webmaster, the idea here is to receive a link in exchange of money. You would be amazed to see how this technique is effective, but once again, you will need to have to show common courtesy. The advantage of this techniques with link exchange is that you don’t have to give a link back.
• Have great content: if your page offers something unique or just plain fun, it will get linked by other pages. This is the whole point with Google page rank model as pages of better quality are supposed to get more links than pages of lower quality. You can find a lot of tips on how to write great content. Generally, Top 10, How to and link articles are a good way to get links.
• Article submission: write articles on EzineArticles and ArticlesBase. These sites have good page ranks so you can write an article with a link to your site which will inherit from the page rank.
• Social bookmarking: social bookmarking can be useful at many levels. Here a list of DoFollow social bookmarking sites that can be used for this purpose. Another trick is to have social bookmarking buttons on your page. This might encourage a few to bookmark your page. This will bring you traffic and a couple of links with minimum effort.
• DoFollow blogs commenting: Some people spend a lot of time commenting on blogs thinking their website will get better page ranking. The truth is that most blogs add the rel=”nofollow” tag to links in their post comments which will not transfer ranking to those website. However, there are a few blogs who don’t add rel=”nofollow” to their comments. Look around DoFollow blog directories to find a couple of these blogs in your niche and you will get yourself a couple of DoFollow backlinks. But don’t forget that Google will penalize websites that spam through comments. So when you comment blogs, make sure you do it in ethical way. As a general rule, content created on social media should add value. If you can’t justify the reason why you added a comment to a blog post, other than that you wanted to have a link, then it is going to be risky in the eyes of the bot.
• Forums: Yes. anything in the hands of SEO professionals can be turned into a link building weapon. Forums are no exception. Again, forum spamming should be avoided as it could have a perverse effect on page rank. The same common sense as for blog comments should be followed here.
• Link Baiting: this is a very effective way of creating links. Let’s say you are web design consultant and that you happen to have built a couple of cool WordPress themes. Why not give some of them for free. All you have to do is to make sure there is a link from that theme to your website. What’s going to happen is that all those who will use your theme will “give” you a backlink.

Conclusion: build a strong network

If you sum up all these techniques here, something will strike out: they are all time consuming. Why, because you need to do a lot of things manually. My advice is that you need to have a couple of SEO friends if you want to be productive. The value of a network is exponential compared to the number of nodes. The more you will have friends, easier it will be to exchange useful links, get bookmarked, join a clean webring and even get linked because of your great content.

What makes the difference between an top SEO and an average SEO professional is the size and quality of the network. Top SEO people will have good connection withing the search engine industry. They might befriend a couple of Google people and they will have a lot of collaboration with other SEO guys. As a result, they know how to optimize a web page so it looks good to the bot and the know can get a lot of backlinks fast.

Take a look at this great article about how emarketing is going to grow in the future years. Of course, who says emarketing says social media and who ever says social media says Facebook and Twitter. Expect to see a lot happening there as this market has till not reached its plateau.

Indeed people already use Facebook a lot and they not going to stop any time soon. Since people cant’ be reached on TV anymore, they have to be reached on Facebook and Twitter, hence all that money that goes into those platforms.

These are all signs that things are going really well for the Internet industry and that it can do a lot of good to the rest of the economy.

The question is: will it continue to grow exponentially or has it achieved to apex of the S-Curve?

My opinion is that there is still going to be exponential growth because there is a lot of value to get from Facebook applications. Once people start using these applications, there is going to be at least another wave of growth in terms of time spend on the platform.

For businesses and marketers, this means more people to reach on Facebook and less people to reach on other traditional media, which will translate into more spent in online advertising. Good news for social media optimization specialists: the market will grow in 2010…well that wasn’t really a risky guess…

Variety.com will start charging fees for some of its content. This comes a little while after Murdoch announced his decision to block Google crawler. If you ask me, these are all signs that the Internet is cannibalizing the information market (uh..da!) in a way that traditional information providers have to move all their resources to that direction and move fast before they become dinosaurs. Since those resources have a certain cost, it is obvious that the output (the articles) will also have a price tag. My best wishes of luck to Variety.