About
About Robert Holland, founder of Social Media SEO:
Welcome!
My name is Robert Holland and I’m the founder of Social Media SEO – a place where I share my knowledge and experience in social media and search engine marketing.
My #1 objective is to help you the reader, tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, or business owner be smarter and more effective with your online presence.
A second objective is to provide up to the minute technology news and information. Not just for the sake of being another news source, but moreso to help keep you informed about the issues, changes, and events that can affect how you invest, implement, and deploy new technology.
My Huge Failure
I’m an entrepreneur at heart. However, I failed miserably in my first venture which was real estate investing. I acquired over $3 million in real estate very quickly, lost my focus, and ultimately lost it all and then some!
Along the way though, I gained an invaluable education in both business and marketing. What I know today about SEO, Google Adwords, and social media was founded in my real estate business. I never wanted to pay a newspaper for advertising, so I would build web pages for my property, optimize those pages with keywords that were relevant to the homes, and in turn connect to prospects who were online searching for the types of homes I owned.
It was an amazing experience to watch how the Internet facilitated the connection of buyers and sellers. As my marketing process became known with other real estate agents, I started to get calls to help others out with their own marketing ventures. And I guess you could say the rest is history!
Marketing my own property made me realize the power of being considered an “authority” on the web and the true power of the Internet. Quick frankly it doesn’t matter what your field of business is, if you can establish yourself as an authority on the web, then everything else will take care of itself – I promise you that!
The Importance of Social Media & Search
The premise of what I do now, social media consulting, SEO, Google Adwords consulting, etc… is all in an effort to make people realize that they can be successful online if you follow some basic principles.
For example, with Google Adwords, you MUST have a measurement of ROI in place. If not, you are literally throwing your money to the wind. Also with SEO, you can no longer stuff your meta tags full of keyword phrases and hope to get top rankings – the name of the game is “building your brand” – there are no short cuts anymore. And also you must understand the importance of link building and referral traffic, and the critical role that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms play in this effort.
Why is social media important in my online marketing efforts? you ask…
Because social media is too relevant! It’s where everyone is, and where future generations are already flocking. In fact, if you look at a traffic graph, Facebook is primed to overtake both Google and Yahoo in traffic – visitors per month:
As you can see, the rise in traffic and relevance of Facebook is something that cannot be ignored.
The same hold true for Twitter! Twitter is attracting massive amounts of traffic as well – and it can also be said that it’s where everyone is.
The importance of Twitter, Facebook, and social media for business is in their power of viral marketing, link building, and referral traffic – in fact, Twitter can sometimes compete with Google search as the #1 referral source of traffic to your website if you manage it properly!
The Role of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing via social media is critical because never before has it been possible to broadcast your message to such a wide audience of prospects that actually want to hear from you – it’s permission based marketing on steroids!
Not only that, but with sites like Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter, your friends / followers actually do the spreading of your message for you if you stick with it long enough to build a following (a brand if you will).
SEO Is Not What It Used To Be
SEO is changing quickly as well. “real time data” is the future of how people will seek out information. Facebook and Twitter have already enhanced their sites to provide easier access to real time search data, and Google has also stepped up to the plate with “Caffeine” – which is a rewrite of their indexing system to facilitate faster crawl time – something necessary to provide more “real time search” data!
So along with providing consulting services to clients, I spend a lot of my time writing in this blog, providing IT / Google Apps consulting and integration for businesses, and occasionally speaking to groups of people about the importance, the future, and the power of social media for their business.
I also try to help as many people as possible with Google Adwords because there has literally never before in history been a more powerful marketing tool for business, yet at the same time, such a massive money sucking vacuum for those who are clueless.
The Bottom Line
If you are perceived as an “authority” in your niche, and people are talking about how great you are and sharing your content with others on the web, you win!
