If you have been using Constant Contact to generate email marketing campaigns to advertise your events you’ll like this.  You can now let your readers register and pay for the event within your email message.  Even better, you can send information directly as a Twitter feed and your readers can tell their Facebook friends they just registered for your event.

They offer an integrated ticketing system which gives marketers the option to create and distribute actual tickets to events that can be printed.   Guest registration functionality has also been added and offers the ability for registratants to register one or more guests, limit the number of guests each registrant can bring, assign different event fees for members and non-members, and allows registrants to pay for the event.  Other features include the ability to post event information directly to a Twitter feed and tell friends in FaceBook.

The cost is $10 a month if you already have an email marketing subscription and you only have to pay the month you use the service.  Now there’s an easy way to connect your social network and your events together doing what you already do with your email marketing campaigns.

1. Log in to your Google account. In your brower go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ (click and a new window will open) Enter your user name and password.

2. Select the account to edit and click.

3. Add User

4. Enter my email SEO@BE-FOUND(dot)net

With some good planning and a bit of work you can still get the love from other sites by way of “Link Bait”. The best strategy to gain the love is putting your energy into creating useful, valuable content that people will read, use, bookmark, link to, and recommend to others.

Share the love – link out. Although linking out to other sites carries the risk of sending people away, the benefits of being associated with high-level content should outweigh any negatives. Would you expect others to link to you if you don’t link to anyone else? Are you really a good authority if you don’t reference any other good information? Link out usefully and don’t overdo it and make sure you are linking to solid, reputable sites and content. You can search “seo bad neighborhoods” to learn more about site reputation.  You can reduce some of the readership loss by opening the link in a new window.

Now you have good content and you have links pointing to other sites. Notify the site owners of these love links which reference their site and inform them about your great content. Let them know they can return the love with links to your content.

If you have a self-hosted Word Press blog or website there are a few plugins which can help you easily share your content.

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated. The larger your ping list the higher the chances of receiving traffic from those sources, Wordpress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing.  To get a current list of the Ping services just search the web for a list but be sure to use the most up to date list you can find.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer will help you manage the pings to other blogs.  Be sure to add a plugin such as this one which limits the ping to one time per blog post, otherwise you may be banned from the blog directory for submission when you edit the post.

Blog Traffic Exchange has a free and pro version.  Basically you join a group of websites which post links on each others related blog posts.  The software takes care of determining which post’s topics relate to one another so it’s automated for you.  Your posts join the pool and receive a posting on related sites.

With time the love will come back to you with inbound links referencing your great and lovable content.

Each online marketing activity offers its own benefits and only you know which one is right for your business. Or do you?

Let’s take a look at how content is discovered on the Internet.

NielsenWire authored a blog post (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-the-next-great-gateway-for-content-discovery/) that shows the various ways that people discover content online titled: Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?
They asked Internet uses “When looking for new information online, on what type of website do you start your search?” The answers were:
37% Search Engines
34% Yahoo, AOL, MSN Portals
11% Sites dedicated to specific information (ie: technology reviews at CNET)
9% Wikipedia
5% Blogs
4% Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

An investment in getting your website to the top of the search results can consistently bring you visitors and it doesn’t have to be on your task list every day. I am not suggesting you drop your activities in social media, but knowing how often it’s used to find new content will help you decide where you want to invest your resources. Just be sure you have your goals defined and your analytics in place so you can measure your return on objectives and spend the time you have producing productive results.

These would be considered unfriendly URLs: http://www.stuffkidslike.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=melissa__doug and http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=25929346. The data after the domain name is called a query string., the string of information tacked onto the end of a URL after a question mark.

One of the basic best practices of SEO are search friendly URLs.

To be “search friendly” the URL should contain keywords for the page you are optimizing. Additionally you should hyphenate your keywords. A massage therapist site may have a page on neck massage. A good URL would be yourdomainname.com/massage/neck-massage.html,

Go to your website and see what your URLs are. If you don’t use keywords, it would be worth changing them and if you see query strings you most definitely want to implement a strategy to change those. Be-Found can help you if you don’t have someone on your team knowledgeable with URL rewrites. Call today for a site evaluation.

With more than 500 million people using search engines every day to locate a product or service, establishing a strong presence at the top of the search results is vital for any size business to succeed. The Internet is today’s Yellow Pages.

Think of the search engine as your best networking buddy. He remembers everyone he’s ever met and stores that information in the index, the index knows just who is the best one to satisfy your needs. So when you search for let’s say a massage therapist in Los Gatos, CA; the index is searched for the list of contacts and displays the best match for you. Your site needs to be indexed as the best match for the search in order to be at the top of the results page.

The key to high rankings is a search friendly website that includes enough information to convince the search engines you are the best referral in the index.

To see how your site is indexed in the search engines type site:http://www.yourdomain.com at any search engine. For example, go to the Google or Yahoo search box. Type in site:http://www.yourdomain.com.

The listings will show you the results likely to be displayed if you are listed on the results page. The number on the top right will tell you how many of your pages are indexed. Compare this number to your actual number of pages that you have. If you don’t like what is displayed or not all your pages are listed, search engine optimization is suggested to improve your results.

SEO is built into your navigation text, file names, graphic names and content. The navigational structure is also a major component of SEO. Unless you work with more than one person, it’s likely they are not an expert in both web development and search techniques because it’s too difficult to stay abreast of the changes in both fields.

If you are building a website to make money, then it’s worth your while to budget for the type of website that can work for you. Invest in both an experienced designer and an experienced optimization expert. The results will pay for themselves.