Twitter Updates for 2010-01-07

  • Social media SEO is good for going viral and getting links for the community (the very best kind of links you could get) #
  • Social media SEO is good for having more pages in the Google SERPS #
  • Social media SEO is good for gaining links (some of them DoFollow) from media sites #
  • SEO tip (4): Increase your business’ presence on Google Maps citation sites such as Yelp, Panoramio, Flickr, Wikipedia & YouTube #
  • SEO tip (3): FriendFeed is becoming increasingly important to get traffic and in terms of brand management #
  • Local SEO tip (2): Increase your business’ presence on Google Maps citation sites such as Yelp, Panoramio, Flickr, Wikipedia & YouTube #
  • SEO tip: Want Bing to index your pages? Submit your website/page to Digg.com and Yahoo Buzz #

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful (and often mis-understood) business networking tool out there. Let’s talk a little about it:

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups

Groups are one of the most powerful LinkedIn tools at your disposal.

Groups are formed based on geographical location, personal interest, business sectors, specific industries, etc.

Members can sign up to receive email digests about the activity of the group so if you post a message (or reply to a message) it will be sent to all the member of the group.

Pretty powerful if you think that you can reach thousands of prospects that are interested in your products and services.

Sometimes you find people copy/paste their messages and spam several groups. So beware…

How to manage your group:

  1. Clearly define the Group rules – that will save you from banning users and police your groups (it may still happen but not as much)
  2. Be personal – LinkedIn groups are all about community and bringing people with common interests together.
  3. Praise valuable members – always highlight valuable contributions to the group. Is problems arise resolve them privately
  4. Add news feeds – if you feel there is good relevant content out there, add their RSS feed. It will keep the content for your Group fresh and the members active
  5. Allow members to promote themselves – BUT only in a designated area (like a sub-group for example). That will keep your members happy and the group free from spam
  6. Group promotions – non competing groups are excellent places to promote your group. Adding a small pic with a link from your blog is also very effective

More about LinkedIn later…

Social Media Optimization

Social media is not just about getting on Facebook, Twitter and adding friends like there is no tomorrow. Social media is about building a community of trusted followers. Not hard sells. That approach doesn’t work.

One of the benefits for the community is that, since it is based so much of user feedback, companies with bad reputation usually have not been very successful in harnessing the power of social media.

Social media (from an SEO perspective) is good for:

  • gaining links (some of them DoFollow) from media sites
  • going viral and getting links for the community (the very best kind of links you could get)
  • having more pages in the Google SERPS
  • finally having “some” real time search results in the SERPS

Real time results means discovering breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks. Very neat.

Here’s some more about real time search results:

Additional ways to optimize content network traffic

Google Adwords team has developed a Getting Started Guide and a series of 6 videos to help you getting more targeted website traffic at cheaper prices.

Topics include:

  1. Campaign setup
  2. Best practices
  3. Selection keywords
  4. Creating adgroups
  5. Bidding
  6. AD creatives
  7. Tracking conversions
  8. etc

The video below will walk you through how to set up a new Content Network campaign. Something to get you started.

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-06

SEO thoughts

Fast SEO food:

  1. Want Bing to index your pages? And fast? Then submit your website/page to Digg.com and Yahoo Buzz
  2. Looks like there are more Google MCC phishing attempts going around. Be careful !!!
  3. FriendFeed is becoming increasingly important to get traffic and in terms of brand management
  4. No-follow links count (a little) if coming from trusted sites
  5. Open-source yellow pages is emerging and that is good news
  6. Increase your business’ presence on Google Maps citation sites such as Yelp, Panoramio, Flickr, Wikipedia & YouTube
  7. Adsense for local sites: Companies like Localeze & Yext claim they are already on their ways to a system like this. Something to try out…

That’s it for today folks…tomorrow is another day.

Cross domain canonical tag – how to use it properly

Very recently Google has announced the support for the cross domain canonical tag that basically allows webmasters to have the same content in more than one place and telling Google which one is the main version. The one that show up in their SERPS; your master copy so-to-speak.

This is pretty big.

Basically if you have a version of the article on your site (i.e.: www.yourwebsite/article.html) and the same version on an article directory (i.e.: www.articledirectory.com/article.html) to achieve more traffic you would take the latter article and add this statement in the head section of their page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/article.html” />

Google did not mention if this link will pass PageRank but it probably does (even if a little bit) as publishing your article is still a strong endorsement.

Write, write, write 🙂

On-page optimization for search marketing

On-page optimization for search marketing

Here are highlights of what is required for each of your webpages. This is how I optimize my blog called www.artistrun.org and have several joint venture partners on this website who also benefit from the on-page optimization.

Step 1 Page title tag

Include the keyword in the title tag of the page.

Step 2 Meta tags

View source for meta “keyword” tag, and the meta “description” tag to completely remove ALL of the meta tags. Once you’ve done this, simply add a meta description tag, and a meta keyword tag. Mentioned the keyword once in the description, and also each keywords separately in the description. Included the plural and singular forms of the keywords in the keyword tag. This is because you’re only optimizing your webpage for one keyword. You should normally choose 2-3 keywords per page, and you would just include those other keywords in your tag as well.

Step 3 H1 tag

Once the code screen is open, click “edit” then “find” and search for the text: H1. This is the html code used to enclose what’s called an H1 header tag. You should always include your main keyword within an H1 header tag. Add an h1 header tag.

Step 4: H2 tag

Next add an H2 header tag. Your H2 tag should always come after your H1 tag.

Step 5 Bold, italics and underline

Go through your webpage and add the “keyword” throughout it. You’ll also bold, italicize, OR underline maybe one or two instances of the same keyword.

Step 6 Alt tags

Add your keyword to alt image tags.

Step 7 Home page links

Add a link from each webpage within your website, that says “Your Keyword Home”. This link should link back to our main page using the URL (ie: www.artistrun.org). Note: It should not link to: index.htm or index.html.

Step 8 All page titles

Finally, add the keyword to the page title of ALL other web pages. Just add main keyword to the beginning of the page title. The new title of this page would be: Your Keyword: Products. Do this for ALL of your web pages. This makes the search engines see that your website is all about your keyword.

To learn more about joint venture internet marketing, visit www.artistrun.org.

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Liza J. Lee, Copywriter
Web & Print Communications
Office: 604.565.8000
Cell: 778.238.2024
lizajlee@hotmail.com
www.Lizajlee.com

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-04