As an online marketer, you’re probably well aware of the importance of search engine optimisation or SEO (if not, check out our guest series here). You also may have noticed a similar acronym popping up recently – SMO, which stands for “social media optimisation.”

Social media tends to rely on users rather than search algorithms to promote content, so the idea of “optimising” your content for the social web might sound strange at first. But the fact is, you’re probably already implementing a number of SMO strategies without even realising.

Wikipedia strips the definition of SMO down to two key points: social features added to content, and promotional activities.

Social features might include things like adding an RSS feed to your blog or allowing visitors to share your content via tools like “retweet” buttons. The promotional activities your undertake as part of SMO usually take place outside your website. These include things as simple as commenting on other blogs or highlighting your content via a status update.

By now, you’ve probably realised that SMO is already a big part of your daily online activity. But how do you make the most of it?

Back in 2006, marketing blogger Rohit Bhargava coined the term “social media optimisation” and set out five SMO rules:

1. Increase your linkability. In other words, make sure you have content that is worth people’s attention in the first place.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy. The easier it is to share your content, the more people will do so.

3. Reward inbound links by mentioning those people who link to you somewhere on your website.

4. Help your content travel by offering content such as PDFs and videos that can be easily added to other websites.

5. Encourage the mashup. In other words, don’t be afraid of people re-using and re-working your content. As long as you’re attributed somewhere, it will usually result in more attention for you. 

Since 2006, more SMO rules have been added to the list, bringing the current total to 16. Luckily, anyone who blogs interesting content regularly and participates in at least one online community is probably following many of these rules already.

If we had to choose the most important rule for agents, it would be number nine: “know how to target your audience.” That’s because the better you understand the people in your local real estate market, the easier it will be to find them online, provide them with interesting content, and ultimately create leads and sales.

That’s the pitch, but what about the price? The good news is, there is a free trial option, but from there its subscription packages start at US$99 per month.

So is ClickTale worth it? Judging by the recent glowing write up on geekestateblog.com, we’d says it’s at least worth a try. “It’s probably only a matter of time before some of their features are incorporated into Google Analytics and other analytics software I would imagine,” Matthew Swanson predicts.

Of course, we’d love to hear views and reviews from anyone who has experience using ClickTale.

So you’ve signed up to Google Analytics, or started using a similar service to find out how your website is performing. The only problem is, the information on your screen might as well be written in another language. If this sounds familiar, have a look through our list of common web analytics terms for a plan-English explanation.

Backlinks: A backlink is any incoming link to a website or web page. Before search engines, these links were useful in navigating the Internet, but now they are more important in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), as they are an indication of the popularity of a website or page.

Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who came to your website and left without taking any action. See this article for information on how to lower your bounce rate.

Clickstream: The clickstream is the series of links a person clicks on while browsing the Internet. Analysing your clickstream can help you understand how your visitors are moving around your website.

Hit: A hit is the sending of a single file, whether an HTML file, an image, an audio file, or other file type. Since a single web page request can bring a number of individual files with it, the number of hits from a website does not reflect the number of visits or visitors it has received.

Landing Pages: By looking at your landing pages data, you can see where your visitors are first arriving at your website. Once you find the most popular pages, you can better place your advertisements and/or lead capture forms.

Outgoing Links: These are the websites you link to in your content. By looking at how many hits your outgoing links are generating, you can see what kind of content is interesting to your visitors.

Page View: A page view occurs when a visitor opens a page on your website. During a single visit, one unique visitor may open many pages and therefore create multiple page views.

Referrer/Referring Site: A referrer is a website carrying a link that brought visitors to your website. Links to your website in Twitter streams and in blog comments are counted as referrers.

Visitor/Unique Visitor: A visitor is a unique individual who comes to your website. The word “unique” is important here, because it means the visitor is a person who has opened the website once in a fixed time frame (e.g a day, week, or month). Visitors are also called “unique visitors”, “unique users”, “unique browsers” and simply “uniques”.

Visit: A visit starts when a unique visitor opens a website and ends when they move on to another website. One unique visitor can make many visits to a website.

[Image: javatuning.com]

If you’re an agent running your own website, the prospect of a detailed picture of how it’s performing will probably sound quite enticing. That’s exactly what the newly-established service WooRank is offering, and at the moment all its reports are free.

A WooRank report shows you three traffic estimates, gives a run-down of your in-site and off-site SEO, and measures your website’s usability. Areas that need work are clearly marked with an orange dot, or a red dot if things are really dicey.

As the WooRank blog explains, the aim here is to find out what you need to work on to get your website noticed by Google. “Only 16 percent of Google searchers look beyond the first two pages of search results,” the website warns.

Perhaps more exciting than receiving information about your own website’s performance is the option to check on your competitors. Because you don’t have to own a website to check its performance with WooRank, you can compare results from any web address you choose and see what everyone else is doing right (and wrong).

As techcrunch.com points out, WooRank isn’t the first to offer free online reports on website performance. Website Grader lets you plug in your website’s address along with those of your competitors, while HitTail offers a similar service with a free 60-day trial.

Ad rotation: Ads are often rotated into ad spaces from a list. This is usually done automatically by software on the website or at a central site administered by a server facility for a network of websites.

Ad space: An ad space is a space on a web page that is reserved for ads. An ad space group is a group of spaces within a website that share the same characteristics so that an ad purchase can be made for the group of spaces.

Ad view/Ad impression: An ad view, synonymous with ad impression, is a single ad that appears on a web page when the page arrives at the viewer’s display. Ad views are what most websites sell. A web page may offer space for a number of ad views. The term impression is more commonly used.

Banner: A banner is an advertisement in the form of a graphic image that typically runs across a web page or is positioned in a margin or other space reserved for ads. Banner ads are usually Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. In addition to adhering to size, many websites limit the size of the file to a certain number of bytes so that the file will display quickly.

Click: According to ad industry recommended guidelines from FAST, a click is “when a visitor interacts with an advertisement”. This does not mean simply interacting with a rich media ad, but actually clicking on it so that the visitor is headed toward the advertiser’s destination. (It also does not mean that the visitor actually waits to fully arrive at the destination, just that the visitor started going there.)

Click stream: A click stream is a recorded path of the pages a user requested in going through one or more websites. Click stream information can help website owners understand how visitors are using their website and which pages are getting the most use. It can help advertisers understand how users get to the client’s pages, what pages they look at, and how they go about ordering a product.

Clickthrough: A clickthrough is what is counted by the sponsoring website as a result of an ad click. In practice, click and clickthrough tend to be used interchangeably. A clickthrough, however, seems to imply that the user actually received the page. A few advertisers are willing to pay only for clickthroughs rather than for ad impressions.

CTR – Click rate: The click rate is the percentage of ad views that resulted in clickthroughs. Although there is visibility and branding value in ad views that don’t result in a clickthrough, this value is difficult to measure. A clickthrough has several values: it’s an indication of the ad’s effectiveness and it results in the viewer getting to the advertiser’s website where other messages can be provided.

Cookie: A cookie is a file on a web user’s hard drive that is used by websites to record data about the user. Some ad rotation software uses cookies to see which ad the user has just seen so that a different ad will be rotated into the next page view.

CPA – Cost-per-action: Cost-per-action is what an advertiser pays for each visitor that takes some specifically defined action in response to an ad beyond simply clicking on it. For example, a visitor might visit an advertiser’s site and request to subscribe to their newsletter.

CPC – Cost-per-click: Cost-per-click is basically the amount payable on a clickthrough from an ad to the advertiser’s website.

CPL – Cost-per-lead: This is a more specific form of cost-per-action in which a visitor provides enough information at the advertiser’s site (or in interaction with a rich media ad) to be used as a sales lead. Note that you can estimate cost-per-lead regardless of how you pay for the ad (in other words, buying on a pay-per-lead basis is not required to calculate the cost-per-lead).

CPS – Cost-per-sale: Websites that sell products directly or can otherwise determine sales generated as the result of an advertising sales lead can calculate the cost-per-sale of web advertising.

CPM: CPM is “cost-per-thousand” ad impressions, an industry standard measure for selling ads on websites. This measure is taken from print advertising. The “M” has nothing to do with “mega” or million. It’s taken from the Roman numeral for “thousand.”

CPTM: CPTM is “cost-per-thousand targeted” ad impressions, apparently implying that the audience you’re selling is targeted to particular demographics.

Filtering: Filtering is the immediate analysis by a program of a user web page request in order to determine which ad or ads to return in the requested page. A web page request can tell a website or its ad server whether it fits a certain characteristic such as coming from a particular company’s address or that the user is using a particular level of browser.

Fold: “Above the fold,” a term borrowed from print media, refers to an ad that is viewable as soon as the web page arrives. You don’t have to scroll down (or sideways) to see it. Since screen resolution can affect what is immediately viewable, it’s good to know whether the website’s audience tends to set their resolution at 640 by 480 pixels or at 800 by 600 (or higher).

Hit: A hit is the sending of a single file, whether an HTML file, an image, an audio file, or other file type. Since a single web page request can bring with it a number of individual files, the number of hits from a site is a not a good indication of number of visits or visitors. It is not a good indicator for advertisers.

Impression: An impression is “the count of a delivered basic advertising unit from an ad distribution point”. Impressions are how most web advertising is sold and the cost is quoted in terms of the cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).

Inventory: Inventory is the total number of ad views or impressions a website has to sell over a given period of time (usually, inventory is figured by the month).

Opt-in email: Opt-in email is email containing information or advertising that users explicitly request (opt) to receive. Typically, a website invites its visitors to fill out forms identifying subject or product categories that interest them and about which they are willing to receive email from anyone who might send it. It is basically providing permission for a user to receive email marketing from companies.

Pay-per-click: In pay-per-click advertising, the advertiser pays a certain amount for each clickthrough to the advertiser’s website. The amount paid per clickthrough is arranged at the time of the insertion order and varies considerably. Higher pay-per-click rates recognise that there may be some “no-click” branding value as well as clickthrough value provided.

Pay-per-lead: In pay-per-lead advertising, the advertiser pays for each sales lead generated. For example, an advertiser might pay for every visitor that clicked on a website and then filled out a form.

Pay-per-sale: Pay-per-sale is not customarily used for ad buys. It is, however, the customary way to pay websites that participate in affiliate programs, such as those of amazon.com and beyond.com.

Pay-per-view: Since this is the prevalent type of ad buying arrangement at larger websites, this term tends to be used only when comparing this most prevalent method with pay-per-click and other methods.

Rich media: Rich media is advertising that contains perceptual or interactive elements more elaborate than the usual banner ad. Today, the term is often used for banner ads with popup menus that let the visitor select a particular page to link to on the advertiser’s website. Rich media ads are generally more challenging to create and to serve. Some early studies have shown that rich media ads tend to be more effective than ordinary animated banner ads.

ROI: ROI (return on investment) is “the bottom line” on how successful an ad or campaign was in terms of what the returns (generally sales revenue) were for the money expended (invested).

RON – Run-of-network: A run-of-network ad is one that is placed to run on all websites within a given network. Ad sales firms handle run-of-network insertion orders in such a way as to optimise results for the buyer consistent with higher priority ad commitments.

ROS – Run-of-site: A run-of-site ad is one that is placed to rotate on all non-featured ad spaces on a website. CPM rates for run-of-site ads are usually less than for rates for specially-placed ads or sponsorships.

Splash page: A splash page (also known as an interstitial) is a preliminary page that precedes the regular home page of a website and usually promotes a particular website feature or provides advertising. A splash page is timed to move on to the home page after a short period of time.

Targeting: Targeting is purchasing ad space on websites that match audience and campaign objective requirements. techtarget.com, with over 20 websites targeted to special information technology audiences, is an example of an online publishing business built to enable advertising targeting.

Unique visitor: The term “unique visitors” should not to be confused with “visits”. Unique visitors refers to the number of individuals that have accessed the website. One unique visitor may visit the site many times (adding to the number of visits) but is still counted as one unique visitor.

User session: The session of activity that a user with a unique IP address spends on a website during a specified period of time. The number of user sessions on a website is used in measuring the amount of traffic it gets. The website administrator determines what the time frame of a user session will be (e.g., 30 minutes). If the visitor comes back to the website within that time period, it is still considered one user session because any number of visits within that 30 minutes will only count as one session. If the visitor returns to the website after the allotted time period has expired, say an hour from the initial visit, then it is counted as a separate user session.

View: A view is, depending on what’s meant, either an ad view or a page view. Usually an ad view is what’s meant. There can be multiple ad views per page view.

Visit: Visits are the number of times the website is accessed or “visited”. Visits are also known as user sessions. One unique visitor can have many visits to your website.

Liaise is an email add-on for Outlook that allows you to do three things: capture, manage and collaborate on the information that comes into your inbox.

Liaise explains that every time an email arrives it finds tasks, issues, dates and priority levels. This information is then converted into an action list, complete with details on who needs to complete the task, which can be integrated into Outlook’s calendar. Multiple users can view this action list, so everyone involved has an idea of how each task is progressing.

Liaise won Best Business Product at the DEMOfall ’09 conference in September, and is currently available in limited beta for free. Co-founder and chief executive Sidney Minassian told venturebeat.com that web-based email is next in line for the Liaise treatment, and that paid services will eventually cost between US$4.95 and $9.95.

Tungle

Like Liaise, Tungle is another application focused on making collaboration easier. Tungle offers a free web based application that helps people find the best time to meet, and also recently released a version for iPhone.

Tungle shares people’s availability across calendar systems. Its iPhone application, side-stepping the difficulty of viewing calendar details on the iPhone’s small screen, lets users shake their iPhones (or tap a button) to instantly find a meeting time that suits everyone. The iPhone application also displays Tungle contacts with icons that show their availability, allowing you find out whether someone is available before you call them.

Evernote

Not quite as new as Liaise or Tungle, Evernote is no less useful. The free application works by collecting everything from digital text and screen captures to photos of meeting notes on whiteboards and sound files, storing this content, and making it all searchable.

As James Kimmons points out on about.com, agents could use Evernote for a vast range of tasks, such as documenting reactions at showings, tracking progress on construction and repair work, or even gathering new marketing ideas. “I consider Evernote as one of my most valuable ‘stress reduction’ tools,” Kimmons writes. “It makes me feel more in control of today’s information overload.”

Of course, these few examples don’t begin to cover the many time saving applications currently available. As always, propertyadguru.com is interested to hear which have worked for you, which to avoid, and what kind of time saving applications you’d like to see developed in future.

As the world of social media grows, so does the number of related applications that aim to improve the way we use it. Here are three new tools that could make social media that much more useful to you and your business:

my6sense: A Twitter Revolution?

Not yet released, the new tool from my6sense has techcrunch.com buzzing with excitement. The tool will reportedly offer Twitter users the ability to filter news feeds, allowing them to follow as many people as they like and still be able to easily access updates that are most important to them. As techcrunch.com explains:

“The company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them.”

my6sense can already rank RSS feed content in terms of relevance, and has just released a version of that service for the iPhone.

socialtoo.com: Update to Everywhere from Facebook

socialtoo.com describes itself as “your companion on the social web” and offers a number of different services across Twitter and Facebook.

For Twitter accounts, socialtoo.com provides options to automatically follow or unfollow people, block direct messages from other services, and create and send polls and surveys. Facebook users can also send out these surveys and have access to a short socialtoo.com address that redirects to their Facebook profile.

The website has also just announced its “SocialToo Status” tool that allows Facebook users to update their status to other online networks, such as Twitter, from their profile page.

Linksify: the Ultimate Address Book?

linksify.com, which has just received US$500,000 investment, bills itself as “the last address book you’ll ever need”.

Essentially, the website is an online address book that allows users to connect with anyone while controlling the information others are able to view. It also lets users to sync with their existing address book, automatically and wirelessly, to keep contact details updated.

There’s a strong emphasis on privacy at linksify.com, with the website stating:

“With linksify.com, you can give your work profile, office number, and company email address to your colleagues and business associates, and your home address, home number, and personal email address to your friends and family. And you can give your cell phone number and your birthday to everyone. Or to no one. With linksify.com, the choice is yours.”

Meanwhile…

Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, we have the new “anti-Twitter” service, Woofer, which only allows you to post status updates with a minimum of 1400 characters. We would say the “macroblogging” service will never catch on, but there are already over 9,000 users who agree that “140 characters is not nearly enough”.

Here they are …

issuu.com … quick online magazine development … and its free.

viralheat.com … monitor your brand 24/7 and join into the conversation about what people are saying about you

drop.io … create a space online (a webpage) in a couple of clicks for every listings or a presentation and its free for most purposes

jimdo.com … create a full featured website with lots of social media tools … in a few clicks

feedmingle.com … allows you to take RSS feeds from blogs and websites to create one simple feed

mailchimp.com … a simple to use and powerful online emailing tool

screentoaster.com … a simple application to record what is happening on your screen and then you can share it with others

geochirp.com … allows you to find out who is talking about a certain topic on twitter around where you are located

tumblr.com … allows you to create a blog and to post articles to it through a range of media including online, mobile phone and so on

usertesting.com … allows you to test webpages on line in real time

99designs.com … allows you to post a design project online and to have a group of designers submit proposals and you select the winner

joby.com/gorillamobile … a tripod for your iphone

The UK’s Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has launched the Blue Book: Residential Estate Agency Standards – a guide for agents on how to conduct their business.

The book, described as “jargon-free and easy to navigate”, replaces the RICS Manual of Estate Agency. As Georgiana Hibberd explains on isurv.com, the recent creation of the UK Property Standards Board prompted the publication of “Standards for Estate Agents Dealing with Residential Property”, which forms the basis of the Blue Book.

RICS spokesperson David Dalby told propertywire.com about the intended use of the new publication:

“With the current pressures on the property market, estate agents’ practices are under the microscope more than at any time in recent history. It is more important than ever that agents work to the highest standards, and that consumers understand not only what a good agent does, but also the scope of the services available.”

The book costs £75.00. Buyers receive a copy in paperback along with access to the online version, which is updated regularly.

“Social media overload” is a phrase that has been gaining prominence over the past few months. As we discussed last month, agents who use social media have to make sure they balance the amount of time they spend creating and updating their online profiles against the number of leads their efforts generate.

When you consider how easy it is to lose time using social media, it’s hardly surprising that a number of online services have popped up that promise to simplify and streamline your online presence. Let’s take a look at a few examples that could be useful for agents.

card.ly

card.ly says its main aim is to provide people with “mini business card profiles” at their own personalised .ly address. Once you have your address and a short bio written up, you can then add links to all your other online profiles: your Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, Flickr photos, blogs – in fact almost 50 types of online profile are currently supported. It’s free to register, however some business card themes are only available to members with premium accounts.

Who could use this?

Agents who love social media but don’t have their own personal website, and who want to draw all their profiles together at a single location.

chi.mp

chi.mp is similar to card.ly in that it provides you with a personalised .mp address, but instead of linking to all your other online profiles, a chi.mp account brings all the content you post to websites such as Twitter, Facebook, or your blog and displays these in a chronological stream down the page. As well as an “about me” section, chi.mp accounts also have a section that links to your contacts. chi.mp community director Laurel Boylen’s account is a good example of how it all works.

Who could use this?

Again, agents with a love of social media and a desire to bring all their content together in one place could benefit from a service like this, and while it doesn’t have the same sleek presentation of a card.ly online business card, the single stream of information coming from all your online profiles means a quick glance at one location will give people an idea of your latest activities.

unhub.com

unhub.com says it offers “simple, smart profiles” with a “personal profile bar”. Giving people the address to your personal profile bar will place a persistent bar at the top of their web browser, and from there they can navigate to your various online profiles under headings such as “My Bio”, “My Videos” and “My Status”. unhub.com directs us to Barack Obama’s account to understand how it works.

Who could use this?

unhub.com could be the perfect fit for agents who want a balance between the more formal presentation of card.ly and chi.mp’s ability to allow people to see all their information at a single source.

As always, we’d love to hear from people who have used these tools, so let us know what you think in the comments section belie.