If you were hoping that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook would blow over as a fad, then I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it isn’t happening any time soon. You can do amazing things with your brand, your traffic, and your sales by taking advantage of social media sites and making it easier on your site’s visitors to use social bookmarking tools like Digg.

You can even track social media success by using sites like SocialMention.com (see screen shot) to see how much buzz there is in the world of social media about your brand.

Sometimes you may want to have an all-out assertive social media campaign built around a new product launch or other big event, and other times you should keep on with a perpetual social media campaign to keep the drumbeat of your brand going in people’s minds. Social media is important enough that any webmaster should devote regular time and attention to it, just like any other aspect of business. Good use of social media (meaning no spam, ever) can make the difference between a site that has mediocre traffic and sales levels and a site that makes regular, solid progress in those areas. Don’t let your website be left out of the social media revolution.

The best domain name is one that is short, memorable, relevant, and easy to spell. Unfortunately, almost all those are already taken, at least if you want .com for your top level domain. If you find such a name, buy it immediately. Sometimes if you hesitate, you’ll tip off a domain watcher lurking to see what domains people are interested in. These people will grab up a site for $30 or so, and if you come back and decide you want it after all, suddenly it’s taken, and somehow “worth” several hundred dollars.

A long domain name that makes sense is better than a short domain name that doesn’t. Non-hyphenated domain names are better than hyphenated ones in most cases. If you can’t get the .com top-level domain, then .net is becoming a reasonable alternative. The .org extension is a good one, but some people think of sites with this extension as being nonprofits, even though they don’t have to be.

If possible, get a good domain name before starting your site and building your brand. It’s not that easy to go back and shoehorn your site name to fit your domain, or to shoehorn your domain into your sitename. It can be done, but the results are often less than satisfactory.

There are experts who devote all their time to analyzing and testing landing pages to see what works. While you may not be able to hire one of them to help with your landing page, there are a number of truths that have been tried and tested and that you can take advantage of. What most of it comes down to is this:

• Make your landing page easy to read with white space, bullet points, and subheadings.
• Don’t ask for their life’s story in registration boxes.
• Sprinkle call to action buttons throughout the page so they don’t have to scroll all the way down (or up) to click it.
• Don’t overdo the special effects.
• Don’t give your visitors an easy way out by offering links to other pages on your site.
• Your landing page should welcome new visitors and let them know they’ve come to the right place. Its overriding aim should be to funnel them to numerous opportunities to respond to your call of action. Don’t make it difficult for them.
• As for testing the effectiveness of your landing pages, one great tip is to give different tags to each call to action button so you can see which ones are getting used the most and figure out what they have that the other buttons don’t.

A website’s sitemap is usually found at the bottom of the home page, as you can see in the screen shot of the bottom of People.com. The sitemap is a page that contains links to every single page on a website. This does wonders for the indexing of pages on the site. Whenever a search engine robot finds the sitemap, it will follow the links and index every page of your site.

Having a sitemap is beneficial for a number of reasons besides the easier indexing of your site. A sitemap makes it easy for visitors to navigate the site, gets across the site’s general theme, and helps you, the webmaster stay on top of how your site is organized so that when you add new pages you can place them optimally within the sitemap, or else modify the sitemap to accommodate the new pages.

Some blog hosts, like Google’s Blogger, automatically create a sitemap for blogs started there. For other websites, there are a number of free online web tools that help you create a sitemap. One is http://tools.lilengine.com/sitemap-builder/, and another is http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, then you should make one and submit it to the major search engines. It will improve your site’s quality and rankings by helping bots and humans find their way around your site more easily.

Web design isn’t what it used to be, and thank heaven for that. You don’t have to be an HTML expert to design great websites today. There are technologies like Ajax, Flash, and PHP that make website development go easier. But you have to be careful when using Flash, however, because the search engine bots have a hard time knowing what to make of sites that heavily use Flash.

Ajax is a great tool for keeping your site speedy, because it lets interactive features operate independently of the page as a whole. What that means is that the user can make a choice by ticking a box on the page and only the part of the page that is applicable to the choice will reload. You might remember the bad old days when a visitor interacting with a page required the entire page to reload. So use Ajax and make your visitors happy.

PHP is an open-source scripting language that outputs HTML. Because it is open source, people are always extending it and adding functionality, and you can do so too if you’re of a mind to. While you don’t have to become an expert on HTML, it’s not a bad idea to have some minor chops with these techniques. If nothing else, it will help you communicate your needs with your web designer more effectively.

Building up a good stable of text links is a long term project, but if you go about it the right way, you can steadily ramp up your site’s influence and place in the search engine rankings by regularly adding text links that are meaningful, relevant, well anchored, and linked to high quality sources. The process of linking to high quality sources is also a way of building up good link karma, where you can honestly go to a site you like and have linked to, and make a solid case for a nice back link from them.

The “don’ts” of good text links are easier to rattle off than the do’s. Don’t anchor every text link on your page with the same keyword phrase. Not only will it not read well, search engines are starting to become wise to this and penalize it. Don’t use “click here” as your anchor text all the time, because when your visitors revisit the page, they’ll be wondering, “Was this the same link I clicked on last time?” And give your visitors a heads-up if you’re about to take them to a new window or to a page where a massive download will automatically begin.

Keep your anchor text natural and relevant, and deliver what the anchor text says. Link to high quality sources, and after your blog’s been around a while, start asking those high quality sources for back links. It may take time, but the link building process done well will eventually cause your site’s influence to snowball, picking up good links and back links with less effort as your site’s stature (and hopefully profitability) grows.

Should you drop more money on paid search engine results or on organic SEO? The question definitely isn’t one versus the other, because it’s about a 60/40 split between those who find organic results more relevant and informative and those who find paid search results to be more relevant and informative.

While there are a few people out there who look at organic search results and probably don’t realize there’s a column of paid results on the page, and while there are a few people who wouldn’t know a Wikipedia entry if it came up and bit them, for the most part, people find both paid and organic search results interesting and relevant, with the slight edge going to organic search results.

The paid search results can drive short term traffic when well done, but if it is driving people to a site that’s not very good, then those ad dollars are not good investments. The site itself has to convince people to come back, and in order to do that, it needs to practice solid SEO practices and keep the content relevant, up to date, and interesting. Paid search results and SEO should both be a part of your website’s plan for growth, with SEO taking on a slight preference over paid results in your budget.

Don’t believe it when people roll their eyes and say that the “long tail” is dead. Long tail is the converse of “viral.” Much of the stuff that everyday people search for isn’t tied to headlines or American Idol, contrary to what you might think. There are things that don’t change much with time. If I want to learn how to use a grommet tool, for example and I type “grommet tool” into plain Google web search, I get a list of places to buy grommet tools, as you can see in the first screen shot. That may come in useful later, but right now, I want to know if its the tool that does the job I need done.

If I search “grommet tool” on Google search for blogs, the top result is from 2008, and if I search blogs next year, it will probably still be the top result. Research has shown that even if you monopolize the top 1,000 search terms in all the search engines, you still only get about 10% of the total search volume. For the long term health of your website, a blog with high quality content that is updated on a steady basis is a great investment of time and effort.

Should you drop more money on paid search engine results or on organic SEO? The question definitely isn’t one versus the other, because it’s about a 60/40 split between those who find organic results more relevant and informative and those who find paid search results to be more relevant and informative.

While there are a few people out there who look at organic search results and probably don’t realize there’s a column of paid results on the page, and while there are a few people who wouldn’t know a Wikipedia entry if it came up and bit them, for the most part, people find both paid and organic search results interesting and relevant, with the slight edge going to organic search results.

The paid search results can drive short term traffic when well done, but if it is driving people to a site that’s not very good, then those ad dollars are not good investments. The site itself has to convince people to come back, and in order to do that, it needs to practice solid SEO practices and keep the content relevant, up to date, and interesting. Paid search results and SEO should both be a part of your website’s plan for growth, with SEO taking on a slight preference over paid results in

According to some SEO pundits, optimizing images for search engines is woefully underused, and according to others it doesn’t make much difference. But the end result is that optimizing images for search engines certainly isn’t going to hurt, so here are some tips how to do it.

• Use original images that you can brand with your logo or url.
• Use high quality images and make adjustments to resolution between the full sized images and thumbnails.
• Save photos as JPGs and other images as GIFs. Search engines interpret GIFs as standard graphic images (256 colors), and they’re going to interpret JPGs as photos.
• Make the file names representative of what’s in the picture, i.e., “small-mouth-bass.jpg” as opposed to “DSC1452.jpg.”
• Optimize the page the image is on. Search engines examine the text surrounding a graphic to determine relevancy. Use labels, captions, and relevant text all around your image.
• But don’t “keyword stuff.” Users and search engines see right through that.
• Don’t put a “click to see larger image” in a JavaScript link. The search engines can’t “see” it that way.
• If you’re targeting very popular keywords, try re-uploading your pictures. Image freshness sometimes clues the search engines in as to relevancy. It’s worth a shot anyway.