Archive for the ‘SEO for social media’ Category

c. Write articles targeting Social Media

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Articles that get ‘Buzzed’, ‘Dug’, “Stumbled-Upon’ or ‘Twitted” receive lots of traffic and build many more links to your website. This takes some creativity on the part of editorial to produce copy and headlines that catch attention and appeal to people on a massive scale. In order to be successful, it helps to build up your social media profile (as mentioned in a. above) and have an active friend network. While you can’t expect every article to be a huge success (i.e. buzz/dug 1000+ times), it’s a trial and error process; by trying new articles topics and link baiting techniques you’ll get better at it over time. When one article takes off, it will more than compensate for others that didn’t get much traction. One last thing… You won’t get anything buzzed, dug or whatever unless you ask people to do it. Read this next section:

  1. a. Encourage sharing to “push” web content to social media

(This is a User Generated Linking method, but since it has to do with getting your articles and content on social media, I’m listing it here as well.) Place a bookmark or share button prominently on your sites features, articles & blog pages (preferably above the fold and / or at the end of an article) with a call to action to encourage users to push your content to their social media profiles where they’ll be found by others. Here are sites where you can grab the code

http://addthis.com/ addthis

http://sharethis.com/ Sharethis

(notice the call to action)

Conclusion: Gaining backlinks from Social Media is a combination of creative editorial and engineering resources as you need to create content people want and care about, and give them the ability – though the UI -  to connect it with their social media profiles, and connect themselves w/ your social media profile easily.

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the best SEO tools, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the best, SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.

b. Promote Site’s Social Media Profile on your website

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

While it may seem obvious that you want visitors from Social Media to come to your site, you also want visitors to your site or blog to find you (your site) on Social Media sites. All you need to do to make this happen is to place icons & links on the bottom of your pages, articles & emails,  prompting users to join, add or follow you on these sites; example below shown from http://www.netlingo.com/

netlingofooter for seo

(as of this writing I haven’t done this on SEOwithoutborder.org/this blog – looks like I’d better get on it!)

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the Best SEO, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the Top SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.

5. Connecting with Social Media

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Social media is a great way to connect to today’s media-hungry, web 2.0 audiences and get major SEO benefit from the thousands of backlinks it produces. Social Media is a topic in itself but here are the key elements to make sure you have in place:

  1. a. Create Social Media Profiles (and update often)

Creating a company profile / group in Social Media sites is an essential ingredient for SEO*, branding, traffic and promotion. This should be driven by someone who has the ‘pulse’ of the site and can post up-to-the-minute updates to friends and followers with that all-important backlink (see appendix 1). This includes building anticipation & buzz about/leaking out upcoming features, new releases, insider events, discounts and meetups, news, feedback about feedback, etc.

The key is to keep it active, keep it real and attract a following. If you do, over time, you will ‘build up’ your profile to include thousands of followers. Here are some Social Media Sites that you’ll want to create and maintain a profile for – with plenty of updates and personality appropriate for your market:

  1. Digg
  2. StubleUpon**
  3. Facebook
  4. Twitter
  5. Farc**
  6. MySpace
  7. Flicker
  8. Meetup**
  9. YouTube

(* A full list is included in the appendix.)

(** These allow link juice to pass to your site though backlinks. While most Social Media sites may block link juice, content that starts here, spreads quickly to other sites, blogs, vblogs and aps that do. Also, for branding, reputation management, social networking and lots of referral traffic, it’s an invaluable way to keep users in touch with/promote your site offerings.)

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the Best SEO, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the Top SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.

Ning – is it the right Social Media platform for you?

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

ning1I’ve been evaluating “Ning” (http://www.ning.com/ platform launched by Google using Open Social API) for a social media site I want to build and found some good and not so good issues with it.  Is it right for your business?

Incidentally, and quite by coincidence, I was walking with my wife and 6mo old son in Palo Alto (California, USA) this past weekend and saw this beautiful building with a nice courtyard, etc. and I said, wow what a nice, rich-looking building – and then, I saw in small letters on one of the doors, “ning’

Nothing wrong with being rich – don’t get me wrong.  But at who’s expense…? These guys are savvy business people and the platform is clearly meant for the non-savvy; they take all the rev. from ad sales, build domain authority by having all the social networks on their domain (90%) or, have their page ‘point’ to your domain (which they host and control at an additional cost but the content is still on their  domain.), then they still have their links on your site – even if you pay extra, etc. etc….

Ning thought about their business model well and while they’re winning,  it doesn’t leave enough room for others to win. I say use ning for fun but drop ning for business – it doesn’t give a new business the start-up chance it needs!

I read forum posts from the site and there a few others that are not pleased with the platform and vocal about it also – citing many of the issues I’ve mentioned here.

I am looking into other platforms that truly allow you to run your own business, host your own domain, put your own ads and links to whoever you want to so you can it out and earn revenue from day one!

Good Luck! & Feel free to keep in touch!

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the Best SEO, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the Top SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.