Archive for the ‘Social Media Optimization’ Category
Thursday, December 13th, 2007 |
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I have started doing something I hope catches on in the blog community: Commenting with purpose. Being the owner of this SEO blog I’m always delighted to see comments, especially since this means someone thought enough of what I wrote to read it and then comment on the content.
It can be discouraging when a commenter is taking advantage of the fact that I do follow comment links, but if they have said something worthwhile I feel it is a small price to pay if I give away some link juice. It can also be disheartening to see I have three comments on a post, but the total word count for all three comments is about 30 words. Sometimes three simple comments like, “Nice post, I agree with your thoughts,” can be nice, but more often I would rather have one comment that says something more and even challenges what I have written.
So, I have committed myself to commenting with purpose. When I visit other blogs I will make every effort to make an intelligent, thoughtful and interesting comment that actually adds to the post. It may not always be lenghty, but my comments will never be boiled down to a “Nice Post” comment.
I hope those commenting on my blog will try to do the same, and I also hope my readers will not feel pressured to write more than they want. After all, I would rather see a short post with gratitude than nothing at all. Thanks for reading and for commenting. And when you do comment, use your name, not your keyword, it cheapens the comment, in my humble opinion.
Update: Well I’ve made one comment per day this week and I feel good about my contributions. Here is one of the comments I made on a post by Jill Whalen about changing urls.
Posted in Blogging, Out on a Limb, SEO Mistakes, Social Media Optimization | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 |
Social Bookmarking is in fashion and many people are submitting web pages to digg.com, stumbleupon.com and delicious.com. I have written about the advantages to bookmarking your own web pages with these social sites and how your traffic can increase (see StumbleUpon Shark Surfaces). But what do you do if you have nothing worth bookmarking at the moment but want to get involved and build links at the same time? Try intelligently commenting on other bookmarked pages. I’ll use Digg as an example since they follow commented links and are the giant in social bookmarking.
Take some time and search through Digg for a article that has been “dugg” and is related to your site’s content and make a comment on it. Usually there are relatively few quality comments and as long as you are genuine and thoughtful you stand a good chance of keeping your comment and your link. The key is to make sure the link to your site is related to the dugg subject matter. While this can be done easily, what else can be done to utilize Digg’s popularity?
Try following the link to the dugg web page see if that allows comments. If the content is on a blog you can probably comment on it there as well. That page will have many links coming to it, especially if it was popular on Digg, so placing a comment with a link to your related web page will benefit from the Digg popularity.
Maybe this is perceived as an around about way to get a link, especially since it may be a no-follow link, but the traffic will usually be more targeted traffic with a higher chance of converting once the visitors reach your site.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Social Media Optimization | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 15th, 2007 |
Living in Richmond, Virginia you don’t often see sharks swimming by, but this week I saw more than a few. These sharks were in the stats and analytics of our client’s sites. Let me explain. We do social bookmarking for our clients when it feels right and not just for the sake of doing it or because it is the new hot button in the Internet marketing community. For this reason, we haven’t pursued social bookmarking heavily. It does have its uses and can be done effectively if the time and effort are applied and the service or product can utilize that type of marketing. But I digress…
Unexpected Site Spikes
When it makes sense, we do submit our client’s strategic pages and pages that may be of interest to the social communities, but more often other people do the submissions for us because the site or page naturally draws the interest of the anonymous Internet user.
I can tell someone has submitted a site to Digg or StumbleUpon because I’ll see spike in the traffic that had nothing to do with our efforts and then drops back the next day or so to the previous natural traffic progression. As I was looking at the line graph for a client’s stats I realized for the first time that the StumbleUpon traffic caused a spike that looks exactly like a shark fin, more so in the first example but the resemblance is carried through on all three examples. I have included them from Google Analytic screen shots for your amusement.
“The StumbleUpon Shark rises to the surface,” I thought to myself. I looked at a few other clients’ stats and found other appearances of the StumbleUpon Shark, sometimes more than once in the same month.
Conclusions from Data?
Since I try to give something of value in every post I will mention that I noticed the traffic increases were somewhat proportional to the site’s overall traffic. You can see this in the screen shots which have traffice ranges from 20 – 2,700 visitors. One site was averaging 20 visitors per day but spiked with StumbleUpon traffic up to 60 visitors. Another site averaged 900 visitors a day spiked to 2,700 visitors, both increase around a 200% increase. So the StumbleUpon traffic may have something to do with the existing popularity of your site.
Examples of Shark Attacks?
If anyone else has data or experiences to share, please let us know. Be careful though, the StumbleUpon Shark could be invading your stats without warning. But unlike “Jaws”, that would be a good thing.
duh DUH…duh DUH…duh DUH
Posted in Out on a Limb, Social Media Optimization | 12 Comments »
Monday, October 29th, 2007 |
Rarely would I ever give advice that included putting material on an external site rather than your own site. But when considering videos I have to say that making sure it is branded correctly and posted to YouTube.com is critical. YouTube.com gives small businesses the possiblity to have national exposure, possibly even more than a a network advertising campaign. It would require an extremely viral video but it has been done by many companies as well as individuals.
There are just too many viewer on YouTube.com to pridefully say you are going to post your video on your site and wait for the video linkbait to catch on. With YouTube.com this can happen overnight with the right video and your traffic would be derived from the grass roots marketing of your video on YouTube.com.
Once the video is posted on YouTube.com you can post it on your site and YouTube.com will pick up the link to your site. It will be tagged with NoFollow, so no link juice, but it will provide traffic through the link. You will also want to brand the video with your web address.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Out on a Limb, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 7 Comments »
Sunday, August 19th, 2007 |
If you read my post about Squidoo last week you know I got addicted to it just a little bit. Our SEO company has started using Squidoo as a tool and sometimes one tool can lead you to another. This discovery was totally serendipitous. As I was trying to market my own Squidoo pages (lenses as Squidoo calls them) I had a thought on how to use Flickr to build links. (Flickr is an online photo management, photo sharing web 2.0 site.) I had been placing some images on Flickr so I could then link to them from my Squidoo page. Once all the images were in place I went back to Flickr to start naming them and adding descriptions. Then I thought, “Can I place text links in the descriptions?” And you what, I could and you can too. Flickr allows you to place links in the photo descriptions and they are real HTML links that are followed by the search engines.
I’m sure you can see the uses for this. Does you site sell products? Can you place the photos on Flickr? If so, you should add your product photos and each photo should have a title, description and link to that product. These links meet many of my perfect link criteria especially since you control the anchor text of this one-way link. Of course you should always make sure the link makes since. If you are selling a bike, take a picture of the bike put it on your Flickr account and then link to that bike on your site.
Flickr images are returned in search results and Google currently has 26 million pages cached so Flickr has good search engine visibility.
To further prove this works, do a search in Google for ‘dark phoenix costumes‘. I’m a bit of an X-men fan and so I posted some artwork of the Phoenix character which is the subject of my Squidoo page. As of August 19, 2007 you should notice that the #9 search result is my Flickr page I created and the #6 result is for my Phoenix Squidoo page. The Flickr Dark Phoenix Costume page only took one week to be cached by Google and now a one-way link has been cached with keyword rich anchor text.
Please don’t abuse or spam this technique but instead try to provide information for your customers with the photo. I’m sure Flickr would have no problem turning all the links to redirects or nofollow links such as Wikipedia. Don’t abuse, just use.
Let me know if you have tried this already or what success you have had with this strategy.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Social Media Optimization | 15 Comments »
Sunday, August 12th, 2007 |
Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have achieved PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore:
Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.
Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you
can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.
Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a
smoothie drink lens to support my personal
smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character,
Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.
Getting Traffic from Squidoo
Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.
Link Building with Squidoo
As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.
Google & Squidoo
Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.
Final Thoughts on Squidoo
Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.
YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing
You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched. If the video isn’t playing, you can go right to youtube.com and watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 69 Comments »
Thursday, August 9th, 2007 |
Update (8/13/07): I Sphunn my first story today on Squidoo. We’ll see what happens. See my Squidoo Sphinn.
I joined Sphinn today and found a few hours of my time were soon gone. It is fascinating reading, especially so because I consider this very informative site built by the ideas and comments of my peers. If you are interested in Internet marketing, and I assume you are if you are reading my SEO blog, then I would say it is worth 30 minutes to read some posts and see what you think. The best and the brightest are there, of course you will also find too many people who are ignorant and/or just taking up valuable bandwidth. For now though, it looks like a promising site. Think of it as Digg for Search Marketers.
Here is the origin of the domain name:
Why Sphinn? We liked the idea of a place where marketers could put their own “spin” on news by commenting on stories or having discussions. But spin.com was taken, as was spinn.com and sphinnn.com was a N too far, we felt. So we went with sphinn.com, pronouncing it “sp-hinn.”
Sphinn away!
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Research, Social Media Optimization | 12 Comments »
Friday, February 23rd, 2007 |
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (web addresses) to a public Web site such as Digg or Del.icio.us so you can access these bookmarks from any computer connected to the web. Your favorite bookmarks are also available for others to view and follow as well, hence the social aspect. If you wish to create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking site (we have many listed below). No you are able to store bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and share with anyone interested in your bookmarks.
Hopefully you can see the value and power of social bookmarks. You can think of it as viral or guerrilla marketing in a way. It can be a powerful grassroots method of marketing your site. Be careful though, like everything else on the web you can spam these sites and make your list of bookmarks appear unappealing or an obvious marketing ploy which will net you very little.
Keep it honest
Bookmark sites you generally would like to share or feel are valuable, which of course can contain bookmarked web addresses of your own site. If enough people agree with the value of a bookmark you have placed they will bookmark it to and as the popularity grows your site traffic will grow.
Don’t abuse this by submitting every page of your site, try to be judicious and think about what pages of your site may be helpful and of interest to other web surfers.
All things must end
At some point you will reach a place where you are no longer drawing significant traffic from your older bookmarks, but that’s okay. Your social bookmark page should be included in the search engine’s cached sites and they are following your links like any normal web user. In fact, you have created an external link to your site that should be using useful keyword text in the link. The real beauty of this is the fact that others are also providing free one-way links from their own social bookmark pages. So even after the traffic from the bookmarks slow you have the added benefit of a grass roots linking campaign providing solid links to your site, increasing your site’s ranking in the search engines.
While you don’t want to base your SEO campaign on this one technique it should be in your SEO toolbox of tasks.
A Good Start for Social Bookmarking Websites
Here are some of the better social bookmarking websites. It wouldn’t be feasible to become a member of all of these but choosing a few couldn’t hurt. I have listed them in order of their Alexa ranking, which supplies some measure of popularity that should be taken with a grain of salt the size of Rhode Island. In any case here are some of the more popular social bookmarking sites:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- StumbleUpon
- Reddit
- Squidoo
- Furl
- BlinkList
- Blogmarks.net
- Ma.gnolia
- Simpy
- Spurl
- BlinkBits
- Shadows
- Raw Sugar
- Yahoo MyWeb
Would you add any others? Do you have a social bookmarking favorite, please send us a comment and share it.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Social Media Optimization | 50 Comments »
Friday, February 9th, 2007 |
Well, I was going to write a post on linkbaiting and while doing some research I came across a thorough linkbaiting article already. The author, Andy Hagans does a masterful and clever job of outlining the types of linkbait, the methods of linkbaiting and the reasons to use linkbait. He even goes into social media bookmarking for good measure.
He notes that page titling is extremely important, but not just for SEO purposes, but to attract attention. He references Copyblogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work as a starting point when trying to create linkbait. I like the list so much I am adding it to my blog too. When creating titles for your linkbait here are some title templates to start with or a cheat sheet, if you will.
Copyblogger’s title cheat sheet:
- Who Else Wants [blank]?
- The Secret of [blank]
- Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]
- Little Known Ways to [blank]
- Get Rid of [problem] Once and For All
- Here’s a Quick Way to [solve a problem]
- Now You Can Have [something desirable] [great circumstance]
- [Do something] like [world-class example]
- Have a [or] Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
- What Everybody Ought to Know About [blank]
I won’t go into this any further, but visiting Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing would be a worthwhile use of your time.
Posted in SEO Copywriting, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 |
Social media optimization and marketing has become the hot-button topic for 07, especially when it comes to effective strategies to promote your site. The following video contains some incredibly valuable information from two social media gurus – Neil Patel and Todd Mailcoat.
Neil Patel and Todd Malicoat know a thing or two about Digg. As active members of the Digg community (in addition to their roles as leading SEO consultants) they’re afforded a unique perspective on the market. Having recently met with Neil and Todd at Search Engine Strategies, WebProNews had the chance to sling some burning questions.
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | Comments Off
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