Okay so you have a twitter account and you tweet often and have people you follow and others who follow you.  Really, whether you are a marketer or not, the idea of finding others who tweet about the same stuff you like is of interest.  Now if you are a marketer you definately want to get in on this!

As defined on www.hashmarks.org  Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. 

Twitter Fan Wiki explains, “Hashtags were developed as a means to create ”groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels. ”

hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags. Opt-in by following @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.  Similarly, Twemes offers real-time tracking without the necessity of following a specific Twitter account.  Also, with their purchase of Summize, Twitter itself now offers some support of hashtags at their search engine: http://search.twitter.com

How To Use Hashtags

First, follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked.

Next, start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you’re tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.

Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you’re interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org or TwitterGroups. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

Origin and interesting fact: Hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster. 

Fantastic resource and origin of most of this content came from http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags  Essential for any avid user of twitter.   Now beware there are some who frown on adding Hashtags but I personally don’t think they see the true value of the idea and the over all benefits as a user and as a person sharing truly something of value.  Only time will tell.

Working Web Solutions has helped my website start to take off.  Before I hired them as my SEO team the traffic to my site was very low. The traffic has more then tripled and I have now received orders from my site. Conversions is our ultimate goal. I highly recommend Working Web Solutions to any website owner that wants their website to truly be a part of their business.

- Joe C
Douglasville, GA

So one of the most important things you can do when it comes to the success of your site is to first do KEYWORD RESEARCH!Why is Keyword Research so important? Because you can waste a lot of time and money designing your site, writing copy for your site, and optimizing your site for the wrong keywords or keywords that are basically ones that wont get you much traffic.

Keyword research if done properly, can be time consuming because you are looking into many factors that make these the worthy choices to go after. Working Web Solutions can take the broad terms you provide and then drill them down looking at more long tail keywords and run them against the following qualifiers:

Qualifiers for keywords: 
SEOT (SEO Daily Traffic) minimum of 100 searches a day.
SEOC (SEO Competition) – less than 100,000 competing results
SEOTC (Title Competition) set to less than 10,000 results for the title tag

Then we proceed and look at the SEO off page factors that are considered

• look at the domain age of other sites on the first page of Google going for the same keyword terms
• look at the page rank of others sites on the first page of Google going for the same keyword terms
• look at the # of backlinks to those sites that are coming up in Google on the first page for those keyword terms
• look at the # of backlinks to the domain to those sites that are coming up in Google on the first page for those keyword terms
• look at the # of links to the competitors page from a .edu/.gov site
• look at whether the top results for that term are listed in DMOZ
• look at whether the top results for that term are listed in Yahoo Directory

Then we proceed and look at the SEO on page factors that are considered

• look at the results and see if the top sites contain the keyword term in their title tag
• look at the results and see if the keyword is used in the competitions url
• look at the results and see if the competitors sites contain the key term in their description tag
• look at the results and see if the competitors sites contain the key term in their header tags <h1> or <h2> tags
• check the number of days its been since Google has last indexed the top sites.

Based on these qualifying factors we then compile a list of top 10 terms for the niche and provide those so you that you can build a site using keyword terms that will generate traffic.

If you want us to provide you a quote for a strategy of how best to use these keywords we are happy to.  Realize though, having the keywords wont be enough, you will need to know how to strategically use them to your benefit.

It is important to realize that doing good keyword research will save you time and money in the long run because you are now going to be targeting terms that will generate higher traffic and get you better results for your efforts in the natural rankings. 

Contact us today for help with targeting the correct keywords for your business!
Mary@workingwebsolutions.com

Rahaf Harfoush, a member of Obama’s Social Media Team, was the Keynote for this year’s Innotech and it was one of the best speaking engagements I’ve ever been to. Rahaf who I am assuming is in her late twenties early 30’s was articulate, charismatic, and captivating.  She had the audience mesmerized when sharing the specific details and experiences she and others had from the campaign trail. She spoke about how the social media elements, facebook, twitter, video on youtube and an array of others were incorporated and utilized in what she termed the great storm.  Meaning what Obama’s campaign was able to achieve was partly due to the numerous elements outside their control and the timing of mainstream acceptance of social media tools like Facebook, twitter, and others.

The uniqueness of this story was yes they had momentum and interest from voters but it was the way their campaign team listened and responded to their core supporters, engaged with their audience and how they evoked action from them based on the various levels of individuals, interest, support, financial abilities and influence.  The tools of social media allowed their campaign team to individually interact with a very personal approach but on a broad level which wasn’t possible in previous years.  

The internet and social media have opened up new ways of gaining support, feedback and contributions like never before. This administrations campaign strategy will be emulated and analyzed by every up and coming political candidate. But the lesson here is the strategy can work not only in politics but in any type of business. It’s having the ability and foresight to engage your audience, clients or potential customers into a open dialogue that builds trust and creates loyalty.

Rahaf recently accepted the position of Associate Director of the Global Cooperation Initiative at the World Economic Forum, to begin in March of 2009 in Geneva. In this role, she will co-lead the development of the Forum’s online community platform. Prior to this, Harfoush spent three months with the Obama New Media team in Chicago. An active member of Toronto’s technology community, she is involved with associations like The Movement, an organization of people committed to collaborating on projects for social good, and The Overlap, a community that combines cross-disciplinary expertise to tackle the challenges of sustainable innovation.

In love with the written word, Harfoush will soon publish Yes We Did, a book about the grassroots groundswell inspired by the Obama campaign which will be released in May 2009. She is the Research Coordinator to the critically acclaimed Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and a contributor on both Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World and Everything I needed to Know About Business I learned from a Canadian.