Guide to Finding Link Building Targets on Social Media Sites

There’s been a lot of debate in the SEO community lately regarding social media versus traditional linkbuilding methods. While some SEOs argue that social media links are the wave of the SEO future, traditionalists staunchly maintain traditional, authoritative links from quality sources are still the best way to go.

Whatever your stance, I think it’s easy to agree that gaining links from trusted authorities is desirable for any site — but that doesn’t mean the rise of social shouldn’t affect our outreach methods.

We’ll start with the obvious: social sites allow you to network and build relationships with industry players and authorities. Someone who’s gotten to know you over social media is going to be more receptive to a link request than someone receiving a random email from an outside party.

Further, social media offers a quick way to see that you’re a legitimate source with an active interest in the field — you’re not just out to spam any email address or Twitter account you can get your hands on.

However, social media also offers an ideal way to find and target industry users for specific linkbuilding outreach campaigns, too. Of course, before you can start targeting, you’ve got to identify who you’re trying to reach.

Courtesy of Hubspot.com

Identifying Your Target Audience

There are three main strategies for choosing your linkbuilding targets:

1. Industry Players: These are the active, trusted people who rank well in your industry and can give your site a hefty SEO boost.
2. Audience Platforms: Reaching out to larger platforms can give you access to your target demographics (a mommy blog with a strong following in your demographic, for example).
3. Natural Sharers/Curators: These are the people who’ve amassed an audience based on carefully selecting and sharing content from outside sources (MariaPopova from Brainpicker is one example). You may find them more receptive to linkbuilding campaigns since they have a strong interest in finding high-quality links.

Iron Out Your Persona

If you’re building links for an outside site (a client’s site, for example), you’ll need to build an appropriate online persona to match. Obviously you won’t do well reaching out to a fashion blogger with your SEO Twitter account. No matter what social site you’re using (Twitter, Delicious, etc.), your account should match the industry you’re reaching out to.

If you’re trying to build links for your own website, you’re the primary source and voice of your linkbuilding efforts. There’s no need to build a separate persona: just use the social media accounts you already have.

Only Use High-Quality Content

Choose the highest-quality content you have for your linkbuilding efforts. You’ll get better results by promoting informative content (an infographic, a comprehensive case study, etc.), not your homepage link.
The content you choose should be highly original and offer real value to your target audience — something that’s exciting, something they haven’t seen before.

Here’s a look at the various outreach methods for social networking and bookmarking sites.

Search Twitter Directories & Search Engines To Find Applicable Users

Aside from searching Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags, several sites make it easier for linkbuilders to find and analyze relevant users:

• Directories: Twitter directories such as Twellow and WeFollow are perhaps the easiest way to find relevant Twitter users. Search by relevant tag (“writers,” “SEO”) or user location. Twellow also has “Twellowhood,” a searchable map which lets users find Twitter users near them.
• Search tools: Sites like Listorious and Followerwonk allow you to search Twitter bios for desired keywords. Followerwonk also lets users analyze a Twitter user’s followers, so if you find one applicable target, you can easily search the other accounts that target is following.

Search Klout For Industry Influencers

Klout lets you easily search influencers by category (“SEO,” “bloggers,” etc.). Better still, Klout lets users connect their profile to a variety of other accounts, including their WordPress site — meaning minimal research for linkbuilders is required. Keep in mind that you’ll need a Klout account in order to access the site’s search services, however.

Search Delicious For Like-Minded Users

Delicious requires more legwork than Twitter or Klout, but it’s a unique way of finding users already prone to sharing. There are three main ways to search Delicious:

• By tag: Enter in your keyword and you’ll the most popular links from that category, or “tag.”

• By site: Enter in a competitor’s URL to see the users who’ve bookmarked it in the past. Alternatively, use tools like Quantcast.com to find out your site demographics — Quantcast has a section to see which other sites rank well with your site traffic (Wall Street Journal readers also tend to read Smart Money, for example).

• By related article: Find an article that’s relevant to your content? Search that article on Delicious and peruse the users who’ve saved it.

Most professional users will have their website clearly listed on their profile. For better luck, try investigating the users who enter in a unique description for the site you’re bookmarking — you’ll have a higher probability of finding the serious users over the casual ones.

Stumble Categories For Guest Posting On StumbleUpon

If you’re sick of paging through “Write for Us” Google results, StumbleUpon offers an attractive way to quickly discover new blogs. Simply enter in your targeted topic and you’ll be able to click through relevant stumbled blogs in a matter of seconds. You can also comment, network, and discover new ideas for content while you’re stumbling.

Search Newsroom Leaders On Digg

Digg currently has a beta feature called “Newsrooms” that collect the most influential topics and users by category. If your subject falls under one of Digg’s Newsroom categories, you can browse through the Newsroom’s “Leaders” (the top Digg users in that particular category).

Search Google+ For Relevant Users

As Google+’s role in Google search increases, it’s doubly important to start courting major players on the network. Find PeopleonPlus.com is a useful G+ directory, but don’t forget you can also search the site through a simple “site:plus.google.com” search.

Search & Analyze LinkedIn Profiles, Groups And Answers

A networking powerhouse, LinkedIn contains three fantastic ways of finding relevant targets:

1. Advanced Search: Search member profiles by keyword via LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature (located in the top righthand corner of your profile). You can tweak your searches to include only certain industries or groups as well.
2. Answers: Check out the Answers section to browse through LinkedIn’s “Top Experts” or “Category Experts.” For a more tailored response, search for applicable questions that relate to your industry and target relevant responders.
3. Groups: Searching for relevant groups or looking for leads in group forums can often pull up some terrific targets.

The Golden Rules Of Linkbuilding Outreach Campaigns

No matter how you choose to contact your newfound targets, always remember the following four “golden rules” of linkbuilding:

1. Have a purpose. Whyare you contacting that specific person? Tell your target exactly why you’re reaching out to him.
2. Tell them how you found them. Showing your research helps showcase why you chose that particular target.
3. Keep it short and sweet. Your targets are busy people — get to the point quickly or risk wasting their time.
4. Call them by name. The quickest way to get your message deleted is to lead with a “Dear Sir or Madam.” Do your research and learn your target’s name. It’s the simplest rule, but it makes a huge difference.

Conclusion

Remember, like any part of linkbuilding, social linkbuilding research takes time. These methods may give you new and original ways to find targets, but they don’t cut any corners. The same rules apply: build your networks. Build trust. Start communicating and sharing relevant content.
Do the legwork, assemble your contact list. The links will come — but it’s going to take some real and serious effort on your part.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/guide-to-finding-linkbuilding-targets-with-social-media-108817

Social Content Seeding for SEO

Social media budgets often takes a backseat to search. After all, it’s easier to measure the ROI of search, so marketers see it as a safer bet.

First, it’s easier to tie SEO and PPC directly to sales than, say, tweets or Facebook likes. Second, search offers an element of intentional targeting: whereas social users log-on to socialize, search users are actively looking for something – and probably that much closer to a purchasing decisions.

But the social evolution of SEO has brought search and social closer together. Specifically, now that social signals impact rankings, marketers need to invest social as part of their SEO strategy. 

After all, search engines look for these “social signals” because they want to show human beings the most relevant search results. And what better way to determine whether something is relevant to humans than by measuring how many other human beings have said that it’s relevant?

So now, you need more than just backlinks to rank. You also need tweets, likes, and other “votes” from social users to let search engines know that your brand is relevant.

Shareable Content 101

It’s one thing to place social buttons on all your pages. But if you want to get your content (e.g. product pages) tweeted, liked, and bookmarked, you need to understand what motivates user to do so. There are a number of reasons users share content, but they usually do so because it’s: 

• Useful/Informative
• Interesting
• Unique/Original
• Inspirational
• Funny/Entertaining
• Surprising/Shocking

Depending on what vertical you’re in and what kind of products/services you sell, your content can probably be made to fill one of these roles. For instance, there are also a number of elements on a page that a user can be induced to share.

• The Product/Service
• Product Description
• Product Reviews (UGC)
• Product Images/Video
• Price

The point is that marketers should be able to find some element on its pages that can attract social signals. For example, if you sell quirky gadgets, you’ll want to make it easy for users to tweet, like, and Digg them.

Conversely, if you sell everyday products that users can buy any number of other websites, you might find creative ways to write product descriptions so that they’re more likely to catch the users attention, causing them to share it. Similarly, you might open things up to user reviews so that your page is more frequently updated with additional keyword content that users will want to share with their network.

So optimizing your content for shareability involves identify what elements of your content have the most sharing potential. Then you ensure that your sharing button are integrated in a way that users feel they’ll be sharing that element – and not just the page in general.

Facebook Seeding

The idea behind seeding content on Facebook is to build a strong base of engaged fans so that when you share a link on Facebook, more people see it, which results in more likes and shares which do support the SEO of that link and its domain.

Now, building an engaged following on Facebook is something that requires ongoing community management. But there are two things you can do to boost your fan acquisition on Facebook.

1. Design a welcome/splash tab that dares users to like your brand. This will point clearly to where the Like button is, and gives users and incentive to click it (i.e., a call to action).
2. Drive traffic to the page using Facebook Ads. Through Facebook Ads, you can target users according to a variety of demographics and send users to a customized landing tab (such as your welcome/splash tab). This will allow you to drive an influx of new fans to your page, and further grow a following of users that can send out social signals about your content. 

Social Contests 

Another effective way to attract social signals is through social contest. By running social contests, you can generate immediate social signals and build your following – both on and off Facebook.

The idea behind a social contest is simple: offer users a chance to win something cool if they follow you and share your content with their network. Social contests can also be run on Twitter, Facebook, or through a blog.

• On Twitter: You can ask that users follow you and retweet a link. The retweeting will help a link go viral, and the new followers will mean a bigger reach to potentially share more of your content in the future.
• On Facebook: You can ask that people like your brand and then write on their wall. This gains you another fan to possibly like your content in the future and whose friends will see has interacted with your brand twice.
• On your blog: Users can enter a contest by leaving a comment and tweeting or liking it. Posts with a lot of comments often gain PageRank and support your overall rankings. And leveraging their personal networks helps you attract more comments.

Social News Sites

Now, people do a lot more on Twitter and Facebook than just share content. They also do everything from interact to broadcast personal updates.

But there are other online communities (such as Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon) that are designed specifically to share content. This makes them ideal channels for seeding content and attracting social media links that directly support your SEO.

When content is submitted to one of these sites, users can vote it up or down. When a user votes it up, it gets a link on that user's profile page. Score.

If enough users vote for a piece of content, it appears on the home page. In the case of Digg or Reddit, both have a PageRank of 8. That means a link from a trusted site. Super score!

Then there's all the traffic that actually gets pushed through to your site. This usually leads to additional residual links, such as from bloggers and tweets.

Of course, you can’t just submit your product pages and expect to go viral. Rather, you need a two-stage approach.

• You have to create compelling content that’s going to resonate with these communities. It might be a Top 10 blog post, an infographic, or a video, but it has to something that meets the “sharability criteria”, doesn’t try to sell anything, and was created just for that audience.
• You have to go out and promote that content. This means being social. It means creating profiles and building them up so that you have contacts and access to influencers. It means giving more to the community than you ask of it.

An interesting benefit of these social users, moreover, is that they tend to share over more than one network. So while if one of these users are willing to Digg or Stumble your content, they’ll probably like or tweet it, too.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2075480/Social-Content-Seeding-for-SEO

3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success

Social media marketing has entered a new era. Brands are no longer content to simply experiment with a Facebook page and a Twitter account and “hope for the best.” With social media marketing budgets on the rise, marketers need their social campaigns to drive bottom-line sales, measurable brand benefit, and improved customer lifetime value.

The maturation of the social media space has created the need for simple, standardized measurement techniques that clearly show whether social campaigns are working to deliver real brand impact and actual sales. Unlike the online advertising industry, which has standardized on a few key metrics (CPC, CPA, and CPM), social media success measurement is still in its infancy and continues to suffer from a lack of common metrics standards.

Large brands are able to license powerful social media analytics software and hire agencies to help them measure social programs with accuracy. However, many smaller organizations are unsure of how to best measure their social marketing programs.

• What should we measure?
• How do we measure it?
• What does success look like?
• Out of the many numbers we could measure for social media, how do you determine which are the key metrics you should measure now and in the long term?

The answers to these questions are complex, but every company can get started with social media measurement by focusing on three simple metrics.

These metrics won’t tell you everything about the impact of your social media programs, but they will establish a low-cost, repeatable standard you can use to gauge success over time.

1. Total Online Community Size (sCRM)
Assuming your business has invested in a solid brand community presence on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and launched a few managed blogs, measuring the total active size of your social CRM program is the simplest key metric to regularly evaluate.

Absolute size isn’t as important as whether your program steadily growing over time. The sCRM metric offers insight into the value you’re creating for those communities, as well as size of the ‘captured audience’ that has granted you permission to receive regular messaging, deals, and content.

sCRM = #Facebook Fans + #Twitter Followers + #blog unique users + #YouTubeChannel subscribers + #all other registered managed community members

To do: Manually collect figures from key channels; calculate weekly or monthly; save figures in basic spreadsheet; produce sparkline graphs to depict trendline. Bonus points: calculate same numbers for top three competitors and compare monthly.

2. Monthly Referred Social Traffic to Site (sTraffic)
Many large brands use sophisticated social content sharing tools to exactly track social media link clicks, content pass-along, and other deeper metrics. However, you can start simple and focus on the total unique site traffic coming to your website from links shared through blogs, forums, and the key social networks. You can get this with a simple query through your Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics, or other website analytics tool.

sTraffic = monthly website Unique Users via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, owned and 3rd party blogs, and forums

To do: Export absolute sTraffic # and % of total site traffic from your site analytics tool to a spreadsheet, then produce month-over-month sparkline graphs to depict trendlines.

3. Social Monthly Impressions (sMI)
Measuring the true reach of your brand in social media is a daunting task; it can take the best analytical minds weeks and a variety of tools. But estimating your ‘social monthly impressions’, while an imperfect science, can help provide a sense of how pervasive your brand is across the Web.

sMI = #mentions of your brand on blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. within a given month.

To do: Monitor brand mentions on a regular schedule (daily/weekly) using a free alerts tool like Google Alerts. While not necessarily comprehensive, this offers a regular digest of the individual instances of brand mentions in blogs, mainstream news media sites, and on large public social networks like Twitter.


Advanced Approach: Evaluate and select one of the many social monitoring tools to track total pervasive brand mentions, or take a look at emerging tools offered by companies like Simply Measured and SocialMention.

Whatever your level of social media marketing efforts, if you measure these three numbers at least once per month and track their relative movement over time with simple sparkline graphs via spreadsheet charts, you’ll be able to regularly observe the benefits of your social investments.

While it’s not a one-size-fits-all complete social media analytics solution, tracking sCRM, sTraffic, and sMI will get you started on a basic ‘measure it to manage it’ program for your core online social community initiatives.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2073592/3-Key-Metrics-To-Measure-Social-Media-Success

10 Creative Social Media Resumes To Learn From

Like flowers in early spring, new social media job openings are sprouting across industries as companies of all sizes look to create or expand their social squads.

The undeniable success and innovation of high-profile social media campaigns — from such brands as Old Spice, Google Chrome and Starbucks — have inspired this ongoing push for companies to hire people with social media skills.

If you’re seeking a gig as a community manager, public relations representative, marketing person or any other social media position, check out these resumes for inspiration on how to stand out from the crowd. Also, let us know in the comments about any creative tactics you use to promote yourself and your skills.

1. Put Your Best (QR) Face Forward

At first glance, Victor Petit's resume looks similar to any other text-based CV. But flip the document over and you'll find a full-page image of his face as well as a QR code where his mouth would be.

Once a recruiter scans the QR code and places his or her phone on top of it, a video pops up revealing Petit's mouth, ultimately completing the full-page image and allowing the recruiter to hear Petit's voice.

QR codes are easy to make and can help you get noticed, especially if you ditch the standard black-and-white QR code and opt to add some pizazz to your design.

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2. Sell Yourself ... Literally

Shopify, an ecommerce platform, says the best resume it has ever received is this one from Mike Freeman, who wanted to work at Shopify's marketing department.

"He built an online store using Shopify where you can read about his background, experience, etc. and the ecommerce part is you can 'buy' an interview with him for '$0.00,' " said Mark Hayes, Shopify's manager of marketing and media. "We get an infinite amount of resumes here. Yes, he got the job."

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3. Leverage Facebook Pages

Henry O'Loughlin took to Facebook to showcase his "Social Resume," including a video in which he describes how to navigate his resume on Facebook.

"I work with mostly small businesses doing social media, so I am demonstrating through this resume all of the tools out there that can be utilized without an ad budget."

Using Facebook's Page feature, O'Loughlin was able to showcase his skills as well as show potential clients what he can offer them.

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4. Video Killed the Resume Star?

Video resumes can be a clever complement to your existing job-search materials (i.e. print resume, cover letter and website).

Graeme Anthony ditched his print resume altogether and created a fun, interactive video where viewers can click on words (see 0:34) linked to an "about me" section, portfolio, skill page, timeline and contact information.

If you decide to make a video, be sure not to just rehash what's on your print resume. Have fun with it and show your personality. Anthony sure did.

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5. Gather Online Networks in One Place

Alisha Miranda used Flavors.me as an online hub for all of her social media networks. Her profile, which essentially acts as an abridged online resume, caught the eye of her eventual employer.

"Before approaching Alisha, I monitored her social Flavors.me profile for about three weeks and saw what she was doing on Tumblr, Twitter, etc. to evaluate her marketing effectiveness and if her style matched what I wanted," said Tracy Brisson, CEO of The Opportunities Project. "Once I saw that she had all the goods, only then did I contact her to talk. As a career coach and recruiter, I can't emphasize the importance of creating something clients and employers want, which is results and evidence."

You can employ sites like Flavors.me or About.me to showcase all of the social media websites you use. Your existing website or blog are also good spots to place your social media icons.

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6. Add Personality to Your Print Resume

HAMSTER? Hired! It's hard to take your eyes away from Katie Briggs's visually pleasing resume, which pimps her "fancy hamster," Belafonte.

"I wanted the first thing that people notice about my resume to be that it's a little fun, but still pretty much all-business," Briggs said. "In any creative field, at least, I think it's important to make your resume a testament to your work ethic. It shouldn't look forced but it should give the impression that the work you put into constructing your resume is an indicator of the kind of dedication and hard work you'll bring to the job."
Takeaways: Make sure your resume shows your personality and represents who you really are. Also, don't bore job recruiters.

"I can say that I haven't been turned down for anything I've applied for with this resume," Briggs added.

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7. Think Outside the Box ... or On It

In 2D form, Omondi Abudho's resume goes beyond the standard text-driven resume. It even adds extra "creative juice" with a nutrition label-inspired skills column.

However, the resume can be folded into an actual three-dimensional box. It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Think Outside the Box."

Using a resume design or structure that strays away from the typical printer paper size is a surefire way to get noticed.

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8. Pitch Electronically

Beyond Credentials believes that "finding talent based solely on a resume is fundamentally flawed." Its service allows users to build "personalized pitch pages."

For example, Nadia Kouri's pitch page lists everything she would have on a print resume as well as her story, an enlarged quote, accomplishments, personality, a Q&A and writing samples. The page also includes icons linking to her LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

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9. Highlight Recommendations

While Jenn Pedde was revamping her full, multi-page resume, she used this one-page resume "teaser" on her blog. The resume puts major emphasis on the recommendations people left on her LinkedIn profile.

"The one page got so many compliments and it was so right to the point and social," Pedde said.
It's an effective way to translate your online presence to an offline print form.

Pedde's recommendation-focused resume led to her current job at 2tor where she works as community manager for the Master of Social Work program at USC.

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10. Let Them Read Your Back

Even as a social media person, you'll have to interact with the offline world.

For those instances — if you are job hunting — you may want to make a resume T-shirt, which would have your resume on the back and something silly or informative on the front. The T-shirt pictured is from Blackbird Tees.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2011/05/20/social-media-resumes/

Why Search Engines Should Use Social Signals as Ranking Factors

It's extremely difficult to test isolated hypotheses in search, given that so many factors contribute to ranking algorithms. Within any single factor there may be second order effects we can't separate.

You know... is it the tweet itself or the link within the tweet (or both) that seem to have an affect on ranking a content item?

In addition it can often be extremely difficult to get a clear and consistent answer from the search engines (Google in particular).

If you're new to social-signals-as-ranking-factors, then I would suggest you start by reading this post by Jonathan Allen, which collates the story right up to the end of 2010, including:

• Matt Cutts confirming the assertion that Google does use social signals, primarily referencing author authority, following reports that Twitter and Facebook signals factor into Google's and Bing's search algorithms.
  
• A patent filed by Google also suggests an interest and research in this area.

Bing states that Twitter author authority is a factor (in some way) and Facebook links shared with everyone are considered (though Facebook author authority isn't).

Google states that retweets outside of the link are a signal, plus author authority; with Facebook links (on fan pages) treated in the same way. In addition, they state that Facebook author authority is treated in the same way as Twitter: "Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don't know who anyone is in real life."

Some pretty clear and exciting statements in there, since followed up by a less convincing re-confirmation by Cutts, followed by a confusing statement later that seemed to completely contradict that links in retweets are part of ranking. Check out this interesting SEOmoz testand discussion in the comments.

Confused by Google? I am.

However, common sense tells me that social signals -- from author authority to number of re-tweets to number of "likes" -- should (if not now, then very soon) be some component contribution to the Google algorithm.

1. Lessons From History


Regardless of how long we've been working in the SEO industry, most of us know that there were search engines before Google, and such search engines used on-page factors and keywords in content to determine ranking.

It wasn't until Sergey Brin and Larry Page put forward "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper, that links were actually a lead component of search rankings. It seems almost daft to us now that there could ever have been an attempt to consider a pages' relative authority without any link component -- links being the very stuff of the web.

Given the functionality of social media sites and our ability to use buttons to make essentially qualitative assessments (I like this piece of content, I'm re-tweeting this piece of content), would it just make sense in terms of the evolution of the web to incorporate such data where it's available (in some part)?

2. They Know Who You Are


"Yes we do compute and use author authority." In this case in answer to a question about Twitter, but we already know from social search that Google "knows" who we are interdependent of third party data.

If I set up my Google profile and add "my sites" with nice XFN rel attributes, I'm telling them straight up that /NicholaStott on Facebook is /NicholaStott on Twitter, and Quora and LinkedIn and wherever else for that matter. Given that social circle results now feature interspersed throughout my SERP, I'd warrant that user feedback (i.e., positive CTR data) has informed that change.

Google knows who we are, knows who are friends are, and knows that we like and trust the stuff that our friends are sharing. Why wouldn't our known interactions with content be taken into account algorithmically outside of social circle results?

Google is a business. Whatever increases value and relevancy of the core product is good for the business. I'd find it hard to believe that social circle data is completely off limits.

3. Product Development


Right now Google +1 is limited to my direct Google connections only (as opposed to my friends network a la social circle). Maybe there are technical or legal reasons that I can't be shown what search results a secondary contact of mine has +1'd (or maybe this is in the pipeline as it is early days after all).

Once +1 rolls out on web pages, I'd argue that there will be greater awareness and desire among web users to set up a Google profile and also connect with others via Google.

Google already takes user feedback into account when it comes to algorithm updates. Panda explicitly incorporated user feedback elements and this was explicitly communicated to us from Google. Surely +1 feedback as contributory ranking factor is on the cards?

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642305

Social Media Marketing Basics: Think First

Social media marketing is new. Social is great -- it's free and it's a pot of gold that only takes a few days to set up and not more than a week to get results.


Just look at all the books on Amazon. Look at the number of results you get in Google when you do a search for "social media success." This is it!


The above is what you might read from a so-called "guru" who really doesn't know what he's talking about.

In reality, successful social media marketing costs money, takes time, and requires hard work. And do you think it's new? Think again.

For many search marketers and social media experts, this may be obvious, but many marketers just starting with social still feel that they are starting something new and forget to take two critical steps: thinking and planning.

Social Media Marketing is Nothing New
Let's start with the feeling that being social is completely new. Really? You think so?

The essence of using social marketing has been with us for centuries. Jesus Christ probably was one of the first who realized that he needed others to spread his words. He had 12 followers at first, but those 12 eventually reached millions -- and he didn't have a Twitter account.

People have been social for ages. If you go to a specific restaurant, for instance, chances are someone within your social circle pointed you toward that restaurant.

So being social is nothing new, and as a marketer you have to realize that. Social media is a tool that can help you "do" your marketing, but you have to have the basics right: you want to find your "apostles," the people who will spread your message.

Let's zoom in a little on two things marketers should know when it comes to using social media full force. These are two things you can take from "old" marketing methods, but some social media marketers tend to forget.

Target Audience
The "old style" marketer looks at a potential target audience before doing anything. Somehow many marketers who want to do social marketing don't seem to care about that, they look at the tool first: "We need to Twitter, so let's Twitter!"

As a marketer you shouldn't dive into social media right away. Think first. Find out who you're targeting -- and make sure you aren't looking at your potential audience one-dimensionally.

Your potential clients are one part of your target audience, but don't forget about those apostles who will spread your message. The goal of targeting your apostles is to inform your potential clients, not to necessarily turn them into clients.

Where?
Something "old school" marketers always look at is where to target people.

As said, many marketers think they have to go social and immediately open up a Twitter account and create a Facebook page. But for who and for what?

Again: think first. Where is your target audience? Are they on Twitter? Do they want to see you on Facebook? Or maybe you should be focusing more on LinkedIn, for example?

This is a different kind of "where" than "old" marketing, but it's still there.

Summary
In short: marketers shouldn't treat social as if it's a completely new ballgame. Yes, there are new elements to it, but the mindset has been around for centuries. Keep that in mind and social will become a lot more effective.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642198

Google +1 Released: It’s Not a Social Network

Among the names announced for Google’s rumored social network are “Google Me” and “Google+1.” Well, at the end of March Google announced that Google +1 is being launched. However, while the utility is social in nature, this certainly isn’t Google’s shot at a service that can compete with Facebook. Rather, it’s a simple button that allows users to indicate which sites they found to be useful.

The easiest comparison to make is with Bing’s current “like” option for pages (integrated with Facebook). The new “+1″ button will appear in much the same location and serve a similar function: letting others connected to you know that you found the site useful. The end goal is to make the search results more social, allowing you to see results that have been +1′d by others like you.

But how does Google determine which users really are “like you”? The first method used is examining similar interests. If you +1 nine sites and another user also +1s those nine sites, a tenth site on the same category +1′d by that other user is likely to be of interest to you. However, Google also assures us that they will be adding a more integrated social structure, where connections on Twitter and other similar sites would also be used to help find appropriate pages. Should Google ever release a full-fledged social service, it would almost certainly be integrated as well.

+1, especially when combined with the new option to block sites, is also a service that adds a level of human curation to the search results. This may help address issues of spam that have become so central to focus lately, although exactly how much impact +1 will have depends on how strong its impact is on general SERP placement.

The +1 button is available now on the experimental search site, and will be propogated to the main site once some initial testing has been completed. Other +1 services, including buttons for webmasters to add to their site (allowing +1ing past the search page), are also being released.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-1-released-its-not-a-social-network/29006/

10 Tips to Improve Your SEO Using Twitter

Google and Bing are constantly working on integrating the social and search results. Social media becoming the voice of the people cannot be ignored or neglected.

Twitter is the most popular micro blogging platform as of today .Twitter is a large network and has the potential to supplement your SEO activities . If the tweets from your account are focused and topical then it surely helps you to establish your online reputation and build a brand online. But, on the contrary, vague tweets do not have any SEO benefit and it is just a sheer waste of time and energy.

Below are some tips that you may consider while tweeting which will help in your SEO campaign.

1. Brand Name

Your brand name or username should reflect your site name or offered services as this is what will be mentioned and displayed as your network, re-tweeted your posts. The more re-tweets your post’s get, the higher its significance.

2. Profile / Bio

As a point of reference, put your website link on your profile page. The bio content is the information part of your Twitter. Maximize it and make it relevant to your website, and the link that you display on your twitter profile, point it to a relevant page that will help with your conversions, rather than just pointing it back to your websites home page.

3. Links

Since Google is now displaying tweets in SERPs, despite nofollow, putting your links on your posts will aid your link building activities or has the potential of giving a wider web presence. Also, accompany your links with effective keywords. You can post your links several times or in interval in order to maximize possible keywords and contents, and exposure.

4. Hash Tags

Hash Tags is a Twitter feature that works like a Meta data for your tweets. These are posts with “#” symbol like “#web” and “#development”. Hash Tags help organize tweets and determine the trending information in Twitter.

5. Mentions

If you to mention users in Twitter you need to put a “@” symbol before their usernames. It is like a retweet effect and the more your account is retweeted, the higher your relevance. It is like voting policy. Hence, whenever you tweet, or Re-Tweet other users ensure to use the @symbol before their username.

6. Be a Help to Others

Re-tweeting, other relevant posts especially those that are of the same niche with yours will help you build your brand and promote your services. Posting everything coming from your site may somehow looks like a spam. Also, as you retweet, you have been a help to others too, by giving your followers a good choice of links to view.

7. Tweet Interval

Do not post bulk of tweets at once as this will annoy your followers, clogging up their stream, but instead spread your tweets out over the day with a decent interval, I would suggest of about an hour or two interval is good.

8. Blog Site

Promoting a blog site like your corporate one is a good option too. Blog sites can provide more information to your visitors and is the best place to interact with them, help them, know their thoughts, allow them to share your articles and contribute contents via comments, and also giving them the option to Re-Tweet your articles.

9. Twitter Button

Twitter button is now a requirement to many websites. It is a great aid to share pages easier.

10. Build your online brand

An effective Twitter account does not just help in your SEO, but will build your online brand, and increase visibility of your company and brand, by building new connections.

Last but not the least, determine a purpose for your Twitter presence. Do you want to focus on customer support or share information about your products and services or would you like to engage with your potential customers or would just like to converse with people from your own industry, etc. Only when you have a purpose you will get a direction and only then it is possible to monitor and measure the success, else it becomes a vehicle without a driver and no destination.

Optimizing your twitter account is optimizing your search engine visibility too. By managing it well, you will have a higher chance to create a bigger network, connect more to people and gain the exposure you need.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-tips-improve-your-seo-using-twitter/28790

Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors for SEO

Depending on who you speak to, search engine optimization (SEO) is either largely influenced or not at all influenced by social media. I'm sure everyone has their own opinions, case studies, and sites that show greater or lesser correlations between their social media engagement levels and their natural search results.

If you were to carry out an investigation into whether social media was a big influencing factor, which metrics would you want to monitor in order to base your insights on more empirical data?

Here is a list of 13 ranking factors below. Feel free to use these and any others you can get your grubby SEO mitts on!

1. Number of Followers (Twitter)

You'll need your own corporate Twitter feed, which brings its own problems around brand protection and also the potential for dealing with customer service enquiries, but the more followers you have, the more authoritative your Twitter persona and the more value will be associated with your URL (assuming you have remembered to link to it).

2. Quality of Followers (Twitter)

The best followers are the ones with their own communities of followers. The more high value people who follow you, and retweet your stuff, the better.

3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter)

It's one thing getting followed and retweeted by Stephen Fry with over a million followers, but it's also important to get the same response from accounts that are more specific to your industry. Someone with "fashion" in their description who retweets your "20 percent off the new spring collection" offer is equally valuable.

4. Number of Retweets (Twitter)

Most likely as a ratio of tweets to retweets -- the more your content is reproduced by others the more authoritative it is. Obviously the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be retweeted. However, it isn't just about retweeting other people's content or dishing out promotions. It's about engaging in conversation with people in the industry.

5. Number of Fans (Facebook)

You'll need to create your own corporate profile on Facebook, which brings the same potential banana skins as a corporate Twitter feed, only multiplied numerous times due to the sheer level of engagement of people on Facebook. However, if you decide to engage with customers and potential customers on Facebook, the total number of likes your page receives will add value to your URL.

6. Number of Comments (Facebook)

A large number of likes, but little engagement, is a sure sign of someone gaming the system. People will tend to like you if you talk to them. Successful Facebook pages include a lot of content written by other people.

7. Number of Views (YouTube)

An obvious one, but any content you upload to YouTube should link to your site in the description, and the more times it is viewed, the more value will be attributed to your video.

8. User Comments (YouTube)

YouTube is also about engaging with other YouTubers and commenting on popular videos. The more you comment, the more link juice is passed back to your profile.

9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube)

Using YouTube can bring in some really good authority if done brilliantly -- if your link from your video passes some value, imagine how much more value would be passed if you could get other people to parody your work and include links to you from their profiles. The prime example remains the Cadbury's Gorilla, but there are lots of interesting mini-campaigns trying to leverage the above.

10. Title of Video (YouTube)

Any references to your target keywords in the title of the video will help ensure that any authority passed will be relevant to a specific theme. Keywords should also be in the tags and or transcript where possible.

11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube)

Easy one. The more liked your content is, the more authoritative it is.

12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media)

Use a tool like Radian6, or a free tool, and ensure that you have significantly more positive brand mentions than negative. It won't be 100 percent accurate as these things don't pick up on sarcasm. But Google has already made investment in this area in 2011, so it's well worth monitoring.

13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media)

Total visibility across all social media shows that your content is important to all people and not just a result of a large special offer for Facebook/Twitter users. HowSociable is a simple way of giving yourself a rating here.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642048

Search Engine Optimization & Shopping Carts - eCommerce SEO

Did you know that your choice of ecommerce shopping cart is critical to the success of your online business? It's true. The search engine optimization of the shopping cart you use, and in particular, the way that the shopping cart software deals with products and creates pages can make it impossible or easy for your product pages to show up directly in search engine results.

One key issue is that some shopping cart designs are constructed in a way that prevents the search engine spiders from crawling product pages, so even product phrases that specifically match your offerings won't show up through natural search engine rankings. Other shopping carts are designed to make the spiders welcome, having what is sometimes called "spiderability," and that's the kind you want to choose.

A second important element for an SEO shopping cart is forming URLs for products, categories, and other content that are keyword rich, rather than centered on product numbers or other difficult to interpret elements. Closely related is a feature that creates canonical URLS for pages that have other URLs pointing to them. This could happen, for example, for products that fit into multiple categories. Another URL feature that any SEO shopping cart should have is the capability to use hyphens (and not just underscores) in URLs.

Of course, many shopping cart features are designed especially to make selling to customers easy once they reach your site and while they may optimize your site, it's not search engine optimization. But there are some other features to look for in an SEO shopping cart besides those already mentioned, that can help get customers to you in the first place. They include:

• Automatic generation of an XML sitemap of the kind that Google, Yahoo! and other search engines use. Submitting an appropriately formatted sitemap to Google, for example, makes Google aware of the pages on your website that are available for indexing, which makes sure the spiders are deployed to all desired pages.
• Underpinning the sitemap is the ability to create the site the way you want it, so another key feature is completely customizable templates that don't force an retailer into any corners in terms of site design
• Dynamic generation of unique meta tags, particularly title tags, which are considered an important contributor to page rankings.

Finally, it is being suggested that shopping cart software that generates HTML web pages, rather than using languages such as PHP, Perl, and ASP, will make more headway with search engines. This claim is worth considering as you make your SEO shopping cart choice.

Article Source: http://www.addme.com/blog/promotional-resources/seo/search-engine-optimization-shopping-carts-ecommerce-seo.htm