Interactive Marketing Thought

I’ve been asked a few times recently what exactly is the benefit of social media to a website’s search engine rankings. The best way to answer that is to detail some best SEO practices when using Social Media vehicles. The tactics show the relationship between search engines and social media better than any commentary.

I’ve compiled some of the most useful articles on the subject:

Drew Hubbard at iMedia Connection put together a great article about SEO in Social Media, specifically for Facebook and Twitter.

Here are the highlights:

• Social media pages are like any other, but with the built-in benefit of residing on a very powerful domain
• Use Facebook’s “about” box for relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions
• The first 40 characters in a tweet are what appears on a search engine; use them wisely
• Create a custom Twitter background showing links to your other social media pages

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Here’s a great one  Flickr from doshdosh:

Flickr’s photos are also listed in Google’s search results, Technorati, personalized start pages (Netvibes etc.) as well as various other portals, websites and blogs which pull in and display public Flickr pictures via RSS.

All of these sources direct visitors to individual photo pages and each of them can be funneled to your website or at the very least, made aware of your business or personal brand.

This is also the slight benefit of having link juice from Flickr: All the links you place on Flickr are currently followed and so they do benefit your website’s link profile in some way.

• Profile. Write a little about yourself or your business and include some relevant links (link to your About page etc). HTML is accepted so use proper anchor text links instead of a string of URLs. You might want to add in your location and some of your interests to personalize your profile even more.
• Your Flickr Web Addresses. You can create your own Flickr web address which makes it easier to share your pictures with others. I’m using ‘DoshDosh‘ as both my screen name and Flickr address. My Flickr address will therefore be: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doshdosh/

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Digg can be a home run hitter for SEO rankings, as detailed in this article:

If you can make it to the top page of Digg, it could do a wonderful job for your publicity and search engine rankings.

• Creating compelling headline and description
  Digg has a voting mechanism that does not even require the diggers to read the article to vote. Thus, the headline and description of your story is far more important than your content. Headline and description can make or break a Digg submission. You should, therefore, write your headlines with the intent of spreading them – focusing more on arousing curiosity or evoking self-interest of the users.
• Timing your submission to Digg
  The key to succeed in social media sites is timeliness, and Digg is no exception. You should submit your story at the right time. If you post your content on your website, but delay submitting your story to Digg, someone else may submit the story using not-so-attractive title and description – thus, ruining your chance to make it to the top.
• Never link story to your main landing pages
  Linking a story to the main landing pages of your site could be perceived as a form of spamming and may get your site banned. It is, therefore, better to create an article or blog post with link-worthy content and link it to the story you would submit to Digg.
• Add Digg button to your site
  This will allow your regular readers to vote for your story easily.

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I’ve been getting into LinkedIn more and more recently. Here are three easy ways to increase exposure:

These 3 simple changes personalizes your profile to your name and associates your name with your current employer.  This information then becomes what is indexed and ranked.

1. Vanity URL

Customize your profile URL to be your actual name.  Click Edit Public Profile Settings in the top right and then edit your Public Profile URL to your name (www.linkedin.com/in/suzannevara).

2. Customize Title/Headline

Create a title/headline that focuses on key phrases targeting what you do and who your do it for. The key phrases should be ones that are commonly searched. Keep in mind that when you either ask or answer questions, your title/headline is embedded with your photo. 

3. Modify the default “My Website/My Company”

LinkedIn allows you to add your website or blog but the default is My Website/My Company/My Blog.  Customizing this strengthens the visibility of the website or blog and also is is a great way to promote through your profile.  On your profile, click websites, then at the drop down, click “Other” and then type in the name and descriptive terms (Other: Kherize5 Adv. & Mkt. Blog).