As hopefully everyone is aware, the major search engines are going through some major updates to how they rank and display results. It is important that everyone on content and SEM teams stay on top of the latest techniques and tactics available to increase exposure. These techniques apply to business web properties, but if you are successful, you will learn techniques that will benefit any personal projects you may have.
We’ll investigate a few areas, and look into techniques that will really benefit your website for the year 2010.
Where to start: Branding
First, it is important to understand the purpose of using social networking from a branding standpoint. Joe Griffin of searchconcepts.com gave a nice synopsis of some of the main benefits in an interview for webpronews.com:
So, simply building profiles and linking to your site won’t help. If you’re interested in leveraging social media portals to improve your website’s rankings, then you need to look at the strategy in a completely different light. First and foremost, participating in the social web means building brand recognition, which can be used for your personal brand, your business brand, or both. It’s the brand recognition that leads to improved linking to your website – it’s not the social media websites themselves that will give your website link popularity. The inbound links will come from bloggers, forum moderators and users, resource websites, and new friends and colleagues that you will meet along the way.
Social networks build brands. Brand building is the key to top rankings over the long haul. Recent updates by Google, including the Vince update validate these comments.
Where Social Media Fits Into the SEO Equation – SEO Benefits of Twitter, Facebook, Etc.
Social Networking and SEO
While branding is important, the effects of actual direct link building cannot be underestimated by those participating in the social networks. Much has been said about Twitter “nofollowing” their links, but that is ignoring much of the residual impact of linking in Twitter. Search results pages aren’t “nofollowed”, and the myriad web scrapers on the internet scarcely bother to nofollow links.
An often overlooked aspect of Twitter et al., is the numerous third party services to rank, sort, categorize, and synopsize your profiles. Websites such as Twibs, Tweeple Pages, and Tweet Find allow you to not only build your brand, but you get honest to goodness “dofollow” links to your homepage and your Twitter profile. That’s like hitting two birds with one stone.
Real-Time Search
The latest word out of the search engines is “Real-Time Search”, AKA showing relevant search results from Twitter, Friendfeed, etc., at the top of the SERPs.
Search Engine Land has an interesting evaluation of the techniques every search engine marketer will want to be familiar with for the year 2010, including the following section on real-time search:
Get real with “real-time” results
The recent announcements of Bing and Google’s real-time data sources has led to uncertainty about the amount of “real-time” results that will be displayed across the engines in 2010. Brands that remain on the social media sidelines should reevaluate the impact of real-time results for their brand, products or services given that these data sources are being unleashed by Google and Bing on the search pages!
Bottom line: These deals increase the impact of social channels on SEO since the new streams will supply another layer of data relevance for the Bing and Google algorithms to crunch. Marketers will need to find out the optimal balance of social media participation that fits within their overall brand strategy and allows them to capitalize this new tactic for improving search visibility (example: Bing’s Twitter integration).
7 Ways To Conquer Natural Search When Google & Bing Face Off In 2010
An interesting read as regards to real-time search results is the article at Technology Review where Amit Singhal, the Lead Developer of real-time search at Google, discusses some of the factors that come into play in how “tweets” are ranked.
Bing, Cuil, and other search engines also provide various kinds of real-time results. Both Google and Bing have also forged major deals with Twitter to get real-time access to tweets, those 140-character microblog posts sent out by Twitter members. But Google claims to offer the most comprehensive real-time results by scanning news headlines, blogs, and feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other sources.
So, as we can see, social networking is important. The results might not be immediately measureable in the traditional ROI sense, but residual effects on your bottom line cannot be ignored if you are serious about getting noticed by the search engines.
Things that you should do
I’m not going to spend an immense amount of time explaining all of the reasoning behind these instructions, but you’re encouraged to investigate the reasons yourself, as it’s helpful to know the “why” behind certain concepts.
1. Set up and organize your accounts
Gmail is your lifesaver when it comes to social networking
This is going to be a life-long process, as there is always a new website to register on, so it’s recommended that you start with a simple Gmail account and register everything under that one email account. Make sure to keep records of all of your passwords and logins, because there is nothing more frustrating than having to hunt down that missing password or having to reset it. Whenever you get a chance to interlink your accounts, you are greatly encouraged to do so. Many sites give you an opportunity to link to your other profiles or even to your website, so don’t miss out on the connections.
It would be a full-time job posting unique, relevant content on all of the social networks, but if you choose to have your accounts mirror each other, such as having Twitter auto post to Facebook, make sure that you maintain a human presence on all of the “major” accounts.
2. Put the “Social” in Social Networking
It might be tempting to auto post your content from your main web property into all of your social profiles, but be warned that the results will be sub-optimal if that is your only strategy. Notice that the word “Social” comes first in the term Social Networking. Your best results will come from having actual human-to-human conversations. Auto-posting your latest articles isn’t a sin, just make sure that you follow up with real human interaction, otherwise you risk being “un-followed” or worse.
3. Communicate with your sources
This is the #1 concept to grasp, a concept that will bring immediate benefits to your content creation teams: Communicate with your sources.
This cannot be emphasized enough. Every writer uses sources when they create their content. Those sources are semantically related to your content, and thus highly relevant in the eyes of the search engines. By communicating with your sources, you create a mutually benefitial relationship with a separate web entity that will benefit you in numerous ways. Here are a few of the ways you can do this.
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Non-spammy Comments
Immediately post a question if the article allows for comments, with a non-spammy profile link if they allow links to your homepage. This is about long-term benefits over short term gain, so do NOT put a link in the comment itself. Posting a link will get you red-flagged immediately in the minds of webmasters around the world. Asking a question signals “Human” and is a nice start to building a relationship.
One strategy is to ask if you can link to their article as a resource. Writers have generous egos, so when your article IS completed, he/she will be happy to let you post your link into the comments section. If you’re lucky, they might reciprocate the love and link to your article too.
Once you have built a reputation as a non-spammer, your ability to exchange links with said author increases dramatically, and this has immediate benefits to your backlinks. Let’s face the facts: This is what Google wants. Real, honest to goodness linking to relevant articles.
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Note the Social Profiles
Many authors have a prominently displayed social profile link on their page. Or they have a “retweet” button, which often signals that they have a Twitter presence. Retweet their article, or better yet, write an original tweet concerning their article, making sure to put their @username into the tweet. Oh, and make sure to follow them. This is a good thing™, since once again, authors have generous egos and love followers (don’t we all?).
Obviously, this is very Twitter oriented, but the principle applies to Facebook, etc., so be sure to keep your eyes open for opportunities to connect. The important thing gaining the attention of the actual person on the other end of the account, and letting them know that you are a real human and that you appreciated their article. Instant love ensues.
Conclusion
While your first reaction to social networking would be to try to get your users to directly convert, your time is better off spent using the social networks as a networking tool rather than a conversion tool.
What the search engines are spidering are networks, links and connections between relevant resources. It is through these networks that you will gain the most value because of the natural backlinks that you will acquire from the other authors and webmasters. Remember, it is the authors and the webmasters who are controlling the links, and it is these links that will directly affect your bottom line.
Discussion of Instructions for Social Networking for 2010