Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

In Part One of this post, I gave you five tips for building inbound links to your site. In this post, you’ll find four more proven ways to develop high-quality links that can improve page rank in natural search results for your site.

Tip # 5: Get quoted – Seeing your company name (and a link back to your site) in a publication such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is fabulous, of course – as is the resulting link juice from such authoritative sites.

Getting quoted in these publications is not so easy. (One thing you can do to help the media contact you is to ensure your press room is up-to-date and that it includes a contact name and number for journalists who are on a deadline. One small business we know got quoted in a story for Forbes.com simply because she answered her phone and was able to give a quick 10-minute interview.)

However, hundreds (if not thousands) of lesser-known media outlets exist – including companies that publish newsletters for their clients, trade publications, and even your own local newspaper.

These publications often need source experts. One way to find them is through a PR service such as HARO (Helping a Reporter Out).  Once you subscribe to HARO, you’ll then receive queries from reporters looking for sources. (The free HARO list comes via email three times a day).  You can also pitch yourself (or if you’re a marketer, pitch your CEO) to trade publication editors / reporters, newsletter publishers, etc. Sometimes you’ll hit gold and other times you’ll be completely ignored, so it pays to pitch publications on a regular basis.

Tip # 6: Get creative about .gov and .edu links – Google gives higher consideration to links from .gov and .edu links because they are so hard to get. However, you can get them if you think “outside the box”:

For instance: If your R&D team is partnering with a university on a project, see if you can do reciprocal links to the project you’re working on.

For instance: Some states let you register your business online – and in doing so, you create a high-value link from a .gov site.

For instance: If your CEO is semi-famous within your industry or he/she graduated from a local university or business program, be sure to send press releases to the person’s alma mater. Sometimes the specific departments (i.e., the business school) will reprint news releases online if they concern a graduate.

Tip #7: Get listed in directories – This is one tactic you have to be a little careful with because you don’t want to fall victim to email scammers who claim they’ll list you in thousands of directories for a low price of $99.95.  Do a simple search using “industry keyword + directory” (so, if you’re a wedding planner, type into a Google or Bing search box “wedding planner directory”) to see which directories exist that relate to your work. Then, get listed in those. (Their are dozens of directories for wedding planners, for example.)

If the directory charges an annual fee, be sure to track your traffic from the directory over the year. If it sends little or no traffic your way, you don’t want to pay the fee when it comes up for renewal.

You’ll also want to ensure your website is listed with Yahoo’s directory (annual fee is $299), as well as DMOZ because Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing considers both of these directories important since each listing is reviewed and approved by a human.

Remember, links are an important element of your search engine optimization (SEO) and Web marketing strategy. To learn more, get your copy of our free e-book, The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small & Growing Businesses. This is a 70-page e-book that explains everything from Web marketing and social media to PPC and SEO.

Debra Mastaler, author of the Link Spiel blog, recently wrote that after she gives presentations about link building, someone inevitably approaches her to say something along the lines of: “Come on, what are the ‘insider secrets’ to building links? Everyone already knows those you talked about.”

Never mind the fact that, as she says, she just spent 45 minutes “sharing how [her team] use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.”

I had the opportunity to attend Debra’s link-building presentation at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose a couple of weeks ago, and she’s right: she gives you the basic methods for building links – as well as some really creative methods even I hadn’t considered.

As Debra states, “The easy part of link building is knowing that you need them. The hard part is influencing the right people to give them to you.” Herewith, then, are of some of Debra’s tips – which (coincidentally) are some of ours here at Yield Software – for doing just that.

First: Ask people to link to your content. According to Debra, many sites actually do have lots of great content but business owners and marketers don’t ask people to link to it.

If you have an article or newsletter archive or a resource library of white papers and case studies, add copy to that particular Web page that tells people to link to your content. It’s that easy.

In a similar fashion, you can also let people know your articles are available for reprint. Be sure to explain how to handle attribution as well as the anchor text and URL people should use to link back to your site.

Using the correct URL is important as you don’t want some links going to http://yourdomain.com and others going to http://www.yourdomain.com. This dilutes your link flow.

Along the lines of asking people to link to your content, this is one reason why it’s really important to build relationships with bloggers. Once you create an e-book, report, white paper, etc., you can then ask your blogger friends to write about your content (and link back to it) – saving you from having to pitch them as an unknown person and being ignored.

Second: Give people an incentive to link. In the same way that you give people a freebie for subscribing to your newsletter, give people something for adding a link back to your site. It can be a free t-shirt, a report or other item that has perceived “high-value.” (Remember, everyone loves free stuff!)

Be sure to add copy to your site that you’re offering something of value in exchange for a high-quality link.

Third: Develop “linkable” content. This is one of those basic strategies that only a few companies use to its full extent. Linkable content is stuff on your site that people see has having intrinsic value to others, and as such many people voluntarily promote with a link to that content through tweets on Twitter or in blog posts. Such content most particularly includes useful tools, such as HubSpot’s Twitter Grader or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which finds broken links. (Do a Google or Bing search on “xenu link sleuth” to see how effective this tactic is!)

Once you have a great tool that everyone wants to use, send out a press release and contact those bloggers who are now your friends. Tweet about your tool as well. In a relatively short time, you can build anywhere from a six to a couple dozen quality inbound links.

Fourth: Comment on blogs. Yes, blogs generally use the “no follow” attribute with regard to links (“no follow” tells the search engine spider not to follow the link and hence the link doesn’t help with SEO ranking).  However, commenting on blogs is still a worthwhile endeavor – especially if you take the time to write a pithy, insightful comment.

Commenting means you must include a website URL as this turns your name into a hyperlink. People reading your comment will then click through to your site.  Instead of sending people to your home page, however, send them to your newsletter sign-up page or the landing page for your latest e-book or free tool. You’ll definitely see a rise in conversion rates – and additional links to your page / site as people find your linkable content.

In Part Two, I’ll cover how to build links by getting quoted in the media; how to get those elusive .gov and .edu links; and getting listed in directories.

To learn more about why linking is so important, be sure to download your free copy of Yield Software’s new e-book: The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small & Growing Businesses. You’ll learn how to build and market your website as well as use SEO, PPC and landing page optimize to increase leads and sales.

To round off our SEO Strategies Series on choosing the right keywords for your website and landing pages, I’ve listed the frequently asked questions (FAQs) we regularly receive about how to incorporate keywords within your website pages – as well as the answers.

How many times should I use my keywords in the page copy?

Rather than focus on how many times you should use each keyword per page, focus instead on incorporating the keyword where it makes sense to do so. For example, if you sell vacation packages, and you’re optimizing a page for “Cabo San Lucas vacation packages,” instead of writing, “We specialize in resort vacation packages,” use this keyword-rich phrase: “We specialize in Cabo San Lucas resort vacation packages.”

It’s also a good practice to include your main keyword in the page headline and sub-heads if possible. However, consider your readers. You may want to use a powerful headline that pulls people into the page but doesn’t include your keyword. (Remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a real-time multivariate testing engine – you can test various headlines to see which one converts the most visitors.)

What is “anchor text” and why is it important?

Anchor text is simply hyperlinked words. For example, in this phrase, “try our free 30-day demo,” the anchor text is “free 30-day demo.” Google and other search engines deem the words in linked text to be somewhat important, which is why it pays to use your keywords as anchor text – and why it’s even better if other sites link to your site and include your keywords in their anchor text.

It’s also why you don’t want to hyperlink something like, “Download your free report here.” The word “here” has no SEO value whatsoever!

Should I optimize for my brand names? I’ve heard it’s a waste of time to do this.

Definitely optimize for your brand names and for each of the services you offer. For example, if you provide outsourced IT, develop pages that address the specific types of services you offer within outsourced IT and optimize each of those pages based on the phrases people are using to find companies like yours.

A company offering IT outsourcing might have pages that describe remote diagnostics and trouble-shooting, disaster recovery, computer security services, network integration and management, IT consulting, email servers and support, etc.

{Warning: Self-serving FAQ} All of this sounds complicated. Does the Yield Software Web Marketing Suite help me with these SEO tasks?

Yes.  Yield Software’s fully integrated Web Marketing Suite automates the time-consuming chore of optimizing your website. For example, Yield has built a library of automated analyses to test web pages for adherence to generally accepted search engine optimization best practices. The software then ensures those pages have the highest probability of attaining top natural search engine rankings. For each analysis, Yield provides a full explanation of the best practice, recommends a solution and, in certain instances, automatically resolves the problem.

If something on your page isn’t up to par – i.e. you don’t have any anchor text – the software alerts you.

Be sure to try our 30-day no-risk free demo to see how much time you can save – as well as ratcheting up the marketing effectiveness of your site.

In my last blog post, I discussed how to develop the right list of keywords – that is, keywords that people are actually using in their searches. Once you have your keywords in hand, you’re ready to incorporate them into your Title and meta tags. A significant part of your website is each page’s HTML source code, which includes these tags and which give the search engines information about your site.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, the Title tag is most critical because it’s where you add your important keywords that describe what your Web page is about. (Some people call this tag the Page Title Tag for this reason.)

You see a Web page’s Title tag every time you open your browser as the Title tag is located at the top of browser window. For example, in the screen shot below, you can see that the Title tag for our Home page is “Powerful, Automated Search Engine Marketing | Yield Software.”

The Title tag is also what appears in the search engine results pages as the clickable link for each listing on the page.

Web searchers like you and me use these links – and the keywords in them! – to help us find what we’re looking for. Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search and other search engines use the keywords in your Title tag (and in your page copy, which we’ll talk about next blog post) to help it determine what your page is about and index it accordingly.

This is why it’s critically important that you use the right keywords in your Title tags. You want your site to show up in the search results and you want people to click on your link. And, as you can see in this example, Google bolds the keywords from the search phrase.

The meta description tag also plays a key role with regard to SEO, except that unlike the Title tag, the major search engines don’t give it any weight in their algorithms. Google often displays the contents of the description tag as the “snippet of info” beneath the Title tag. In the screen shot above, Google pulled part of the snippet from our description tag and part from our home page copy.

Although there’s no guarantee that Google or others will use your description tag as the snippet, it’s still a good idea to develop compelling description tags that prompts people to click on your link when confronted with nine other links on the search engine results pages.

When developing your Title and description tags, keep in mind the following dos and don’ts:

Do focus on two to three keywords per page – People mistakenly believe that they can add a half dozen keywords to a Title tag. SEO best practices dictate, however, that you focus on only two to three keywords per page.

Do Develop unique tags for each page – Every page on your site, and especially your products and services pages, should have a unique Title and description tag.

Do “match” your Title and description tags – The keywords you use in the Title tag should also appear in description tag. This helps your listing stand out more as people see the bolded words in the link and the snippet – a visual double whammy.

Do limit Title tags to approximately 70 characters – Google cuts off longer Title tags, so keep your Title tags brief. The character count includes all characters, such as dashes, and spaces.

Do limit description tags to approximately 150 characters – The same holds true for this tag as well.

Don’t put your company name first – Google gives more weight to the keywords at the beginning of the Title tag, so add your company name at the end of the Title tag.

Don’t ignore word order – If one of your best keywords is “romantic hotels in san Francisco,” your Title and description tag should include this exact keyword phrase.

Don’t “set and forget” – Monitor your search engine rankings and conversions. Which keywords drive the best traffic that converts into sales? Which keywords aren’t working? Constantly monitor what’s working and make changes as necessary.

You can reduce the amount of time you spend tediously monitoring and tweaking your keywords by using Yield Software’s fully integrated suite of automated Web marketing capabilities. The system checks your website regularly against our library of SEO best practice to ensure your Title and meta tags are up to snuff, among many, many other variables. When the system identifies problems, it offers a clear explanation of the problem; a solution for fixing it; and even offers auto-fixes for many common issues that crop up.

See how easy it is to automate your SEO by signing up for our free 30-day trial offer.

The foundation for effective search engine optimization (SEO) is choosing the right keywords.  Optimize your Website and landing pages with the wrong keywords and you’ll see little, if any, traffic to your site.

Choose the right keywords, however, and traffic will soar.

The problem many companies make when optimizing a Website is choosing keywords they think their customers are using – versus the keywords people are actually using in their searches.

In other words, marketers and business owners make keyword decisions based on hunches, not data.

Fortunately, this is a very easy fix. To determine the best keywords, all you need is a keyword search tool, such as Google’s free Keyword Search Tool, as well as tools like our own SEO Module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.

Tools like Google’s give you one piece of data you need to make important keyword decisions: they tell you how many people searched a specific keyword phrase for a given period of time. (Google even breaks the data out between “local” or US-based searches and global searches.)  Taken together with Yield’s SEO Module, you’ll discover what keywords your site is currently optimized for and what people (i.e., your customers) are actually using in their searches.

Using these tools is not enough however. Knowing how many people searched a given keyword phrase is good. Knowing which keywords are right for your company is better. How do you determine the right keywords? Follow these tips:

First: Specific is better – Many companies mistakenly believe that their Website should have high rankings for generic keywords such as “HR Consultants.” The problem with generic keywords like this is that 1) it’s very hard to achieve high rankings and 2) they are so generic that even if you do achieve a high ranking, you’ll end up with lots of untargeted (re: poorly qualified) traffic.

When choosing keywords, think specific. If your company provides HR consulting, describe the type of consulting you provide and the industries you work with, i.e. manufacturing HR Consultants, financial HR consultants, technology HR consultants, etc.

The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your traffic will be and the higher your conversion rates.

Second: Word forms matter – Although you may call yourself “HR consultants,” your prospects may be searching for “HR consulting firms.”

Also pay attention to plurals of words i.e.: “HR consultants” versus “HR consultant.” The traffic for each word form can vary greatly.

Consider other words closely related to your main keyword. For example, in addition to “consultants” and “consulting,” research whether people are using “consultancy” “firms,” “companies,” “services,” and “consulting services.”

And most important, don’t forget to research the above word forms using the long version of “HR” – “human resources.” The difference in search numbers may surprise you.

Third: Go local – You may work with companies across the U.S. (or maybe even around the globe), but it pays to ensure your site is also optimized for local search.

This means that in addition to the keywords above, you’ll want to see if people are looking for HR companies in your city, region, and state.

For example, an HR company based in San Francisco would do a keyword search using “HR company San Francisco,” “HR company Silicon Valley,” “HR company SF Bay Area,” and “HR company California.”

When doing your research, keep track of the keywords that have zero or little traffic – you’ll want to remember why you’re optimizing the company site around given keywords.

Once you’ve developed a list of keywords, input them into an Excel spreadsheet and then sort them by search volume and alphabetically. Sorting by volume makes it easy to see which keywords generate the best traffic; sorting alphabetically makes it easy to see which keywords you’ve included in your search.

So: small plug for Yield Software… Knowing the best keywords around which to optimize your website is critical. Using our Yield Web Marketing Suite to manage your performance against those keywords helps you to achieve the best possible page rank for your keywords.  The system checks your website regularly against our library of SEO best practice to ensure there’s nothing going on to prevent you from achieving your highest possible rank in natural search results.  When the system identifies problems, it offers a clear explanation of the problem; a solution for fixing it; and even offers auto-fixes for many common issues that crop up.

You can learn more about our Yield Web Marketing Suite here.