Archive for the ‘Social Media Optimization’ Category
Monday, September 8th, 2008 |
By now, I’m sure you know the importance of creating fresh, quality content on your site. One of the ways you probably do this is through a blog. These days everyone has a blog, and why not? It’s an easy way to get articles syndicated and ensures you have fresh content on your site, along with many other benefits.
However, in this world of Web 2.0, just having a blog isn’t enough. You need to get out there and take part in your online community. You need to comment on other people’s blogs.
Don’t know why? Well, you’re in luck, because here are the top five reasons to comment on other people’s blogs.
Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get Known in the Community
The goal of SEO is getting your site to rank, which happens when the search engines view you as an authority on a subject. Before the search engines can view you as an authority, people need to view you as such. One of the easiest ways to make this happen is by leaving good, meaningful comments on other people’s blogs.
Think about it like this: No matter how good your content is, if the search engines don’t know about it and people don’t know about it, then you’re just writing for yourself. You need to go to the people. Go to a blog that has a large readership and start leaving good comments. This will introduce you to a large readership.
I promise, when you give beneficial comments, people will respond. The owners of the site will get to know you because of your comments, and users will come to enjoy how useful they are. This successfully accomplishes your first task — having the people regard you as an authority on a subject.
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Posted in Blogging, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 19 Comments »
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 |
Many of you may know about LinkedIn. If you don’t, then let me enlighten. Linkedin is a social networking site that targets business professionals. It is helpful in setting up relationships for business opportunities and partnerships. It also has a more social aspect that is gaining in popularity. You can read more about LinkedIn here: What is LinkedIn?
And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.
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Posted in Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 31 Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008 |
No Time to Twitt Mr Jones?
One of the most common complaints of Twitter is that one doesn’t have enough time to spend keeping up with their Twitter accounts. They are to busy doing more important things, such as reading our Blog or the “ranked hard, SEO comic“.
Now I can’t blame them for that, but for the rest of you Non Twitter Time Takers, a new solution is made especially for you.
@ShannonCole has come up with TwitResponse an application that allows you to “pre-record” or “pre-type” your twitter messages and have them scheduled to appear to your Twitter Followers at predetermined intervals in the future.
The program is in BETA but works extremely well. The description from their page reads
“Twitter + AutoResponder = TwitResponse!
Setup unlimited messages to be delivered to your twitter page when you want. Need a message sent 2 hours from now, no problem, setup a TwitResponse.
Having a product launch, upcoming seminar, book release… Setup a TwitResponse to automatically notify your followers.
Make sure you register to see the full effects, and then Twit me in advance, something, in the Future to @bigebiz.
Psst.. You might want to Add @ShellHarris to that list, he may not figure it out right away that your message was “pre-typed” but that’s half the fun of Twitter.com isn’t it?
Pssst…. Chris just joined in as well Catch him @BigOakChris
Posted in Social Media Optimization, Twitter, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 |
I found this funny graph at graphjam.com. I thought it was appropriate considering my latest post on twitter. Agree or disagree?
Posted in Out on a Limb, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 6 Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
I must admit that I go back and forth on how useful twitter can be. For the last few weeks I have hardly twitted and have read even less tweets than I have written. We created a comic (Jason Calacanis -SEO Has No Future) and that spurred a huge traffic spike in our site’s stas. I knew we were featured on the home page of Calacanis.com so my natural assumption was that our traffic came from Jason’s popular home page.
Looking into our stats I discovered that a small amount of traffic did come from his site, but the overwhelming amount of traffic came from twitter pages. A few seconds of research and I found that Jason Calacanis had twitted about the comic. That twit, directly and indirectly, was providing most of traffic. Amazing, twitter can be useful…if the right people are doing the twittering.
Of course it does help when a lightning rod such as Jason Calacanis (He has over 32,000 followers) is doing the twittering. Feel free to follow me on twitter; I promise not to tell you what I had for lunch.
Posted in Social Media Optimization | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 |
This is perfect example of why I don’t use Sphinn anymore. And yes, I realize the irony of writing that statement and then posting a screen shot of Sphinn. I was curious to see if a comic we wrote (which has a gravestone with Sphinn on it) had been “sphunn”. I scrolled down the front page and saw the following item had been sphunn 44 times. Unbelievable.
What is so amazing about this story? Well, nothing.
I apologize to Lisa Barone, I’m sure she is an excellent person and I wish her a happy birthday, but is this really worthy of going “hot” on Sphinn? Is this the Internet Marketing information we crave? From their own “What’s Sphinn?” page:
Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.
Does this story fit that ideal? I firmly believe the top sphunn stories are usually made so by a group of people mutually sphinning their own stories and I have seen many sphunn stories like this, both frivolous and unrelated to the cause that Sphinn is supposed to have. It feels like a gated community where only members are allowed to achieve success.
This is exactly why I stopped supporting Sphinn a few months ago and removed the Sphinn buttons from this blog. Too many stories making the hot list that shouldn’t be there. Do we need anymore proof that the Sphinn site has little value and is really a marketing tool for a select group?
While I believe Sphinn is just a ego massage for Internet marketers it really isn’t hurting anyone, but on the other hand I believe everyone should take information and opinion of Sphinn with a giant grain of salt and realize where the real spinning is taking place.
Posted in Out on a Limb, Social Media Optimization | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 |
A very resourceful gentleman by the name of Andrew Baron put his Twitter account on ebay. This account has 1,400 followers who have also been put on the auction block whether they like it or not. You can see the auction on eBay. It was up to $1,550 when I took this screen shot, with 7 days to go. Amazing!
Why is he sellng his account? From his own words:
I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.
So I guess Twitter does have monetary value and you can throw your “twits” under than bus when you sell it. I would personally be a little upset if I was following him, but you have to appreciate the genius of this auction. What is your Twitter account worth?
If anyone has a twitter account they think I might like to follow please submit it in a comment. I’m still not sold on its value.
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 |
I’m not going to write a review of twitter, mainly because I have only started using it recently and I’m undecided about its practical uses. If you would like to see what others think of twitter you can read a review here or here. I did include two videos in this post so you can get a quick idea of what it is and how it works.
What is Twitter? Twitter is a social messaging tool for staying connected in real-time.
I do find it very cool that I have access to other SEO Experts and even cooler some of them have been kind enough to read what I’m twittering about. If you are interested in what I am doing you follow me at http://twitter.com/ShellHarris. Is anyone else twittering. Please pass along any thoughts on this social media tool.
Update: I was amazed to find the Google pulled an alert for me from a Twitter comment I made. I had made a comment about our newest SEO Comic and my alert pulls any mention of “SEO Comic”. So Google is caching my twitter page. The link are all nofollow, but we know Google follows nofollow they just don’t apply an link popularity from them.
The following videos can demonstrate the genius or madness of Twitter. I am yet undecided.
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Research, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 |
Many were enraged last week when Flickr added nofollow tags to comments and picture captions. Why people would be enraged is beyond me because even my dead pet octopus could have predicted that Flickr’s sad fate was rapidly approaching. And the more that SEO’s kept blogging about how great Flickr was as an SEO tool, the faster the digits on the time bomb moved.
So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns.
1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.
2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.
3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.
Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently.
So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 25 Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008 |
I personally like StumbleUpon. It is a good diversion, some would call it a time-waster, and I have discovered some amazing things through it. On the other hand, I don’t think it is a great method of marketing your site, but it does have its benefits, especially when you consider the minuscule amount of time your actually put into it…basically you click a button and you are done. Hard to complain about the work. No, the real work is creating something worth stumbling. I talked about the infusion of traffic and named then traffic spike “The StumbleUpon Shark” but something different happened this week.
You may have read about our new SEO Comic, Ranked Hard in a previous post (if not, check it out), well it has been stumbled and we saw the biggest spike we have ever received. Of course that was nice, but surprisingly it held serve the next day and increased even more the next day. Amazing.
The graph below shows our site’s total traffic from StumbleUpon. The top number of visitors from StumbleUpon reach 585. We will certainly keep watching over the next few days but it is good to see that StumbleUpon can provide traffic for more than just one fabulous day on occasion. Obviously the quality and possible niche of the content can be attributable to the staying power of the traffic. But it can be done.
Posted in Link Building, Out on a Limb, Social Media Optimization | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 |
Before you begin watching this video on RSS, I have to give a HUGE recommendation to the company that produced this remarkable piece of work, Common Craft. They have created some very creative and helpful videos to help people understand a variety of technologies and ideas, such as RSS. They say it best themselves:
We use a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas.
We’re interpreters. We present your products and services in plain English using short, unique and understandable videos in a format we call Paperworks.
They have many more videos for you to see and I wish them the best and hope they succeed. The idea is wonderful and the delivery is even better. The Internet needs more companies like them.
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 3 Comments »
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