SEO Archives

Social Media: Week-in-Review, April 27, 2013

April 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

In case you missed some of the topics we covered this week, here is the social media week-in-review!

Effective SEO Tips for Optimizing Content on Your Page

There is an curious irony when it comes to SEO: everyone knows that it is important when it comes to getting found, but few people understand how it works. While it may seem like a complicated endeavour to optimize your content – what with all the talk about algorithms and pandas – there are few simple steps you can take that will make a big difference!

Social Media for Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social marketing is not something that should be adopted only y big companies. Businesses of all sizes, even small businesses, can use social media to their advantage and help grow their business! Find out how social marketing is helping small businesses in a great infographic!

What are ‘Targeted Tweets’ and How Should You Use Them?

Recently, Twitter unveiled their newest marketing tool: Targeted Tweets. This new feature brings in an entirely new advertising angle from which marketers can take advantage. Find out what these updates are and how you can use them to gain a competitive edge early!

Social Media Case Study: Honda

About a year ago, Honda noticed a growing trend and near-obsession with Pinterest. They decided that the best way to promote their newest CR-V was to launch a cost-effective campaign aimed at spreading the word virally. The approached worked and Honda created a campaign worthy of a feature in this week’s social media case study.

Social Equity: The Effect of Social Media on Your Brand

How does your brand’s image benefit from your involvement in social marketing? In this week’s Social Equity segment, we decipher how your brand equity increases both in the short- and long-run with the strategic use of social media marketing.

Have a look through some of these great articles and enjoy your weekend!

Effective SEO Tips For Optimizing Content On Your Page

April 22, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Content that cannot be linked back to is not going to be useful to your business or SEO at all.

The same goes for content that you can’t share. Content is important for the search engines these days, especially with all the changes being made.

This is especially true with the Penguin and Panda updates. Creating content these days has to not only come across as attractive to real customers and visitors, but it needs to be attractive to search engine robots.

Here are a few of the many tips to help you get both objectives met in your content.

Length of Content

No matter what you’re writing, from articles to blog content, you want to make sure they are longer than 300 words. This is because anything less than that is going to be hard to get basic information across. You need more than 300 words to explain a product or service, and writing more gives you a better chance to do so. Web pages are ranked for the value and information they bring to the table.

The longer the content you write, the better it is for your site and for SEO purposes. However, don’t get out of line with writing long content. A good rule of thumb is anything from 300-1000 words.

Avoid Duplicate Content

There’s nothing worse that writing the same articles over and over again for your site. You shouldn’t have the same two pages on your website and if you do happen to have duplicate content, this is going to be frowned upon by the robots crawling your site.

However, if duplicate content can’t be avoided, be sure you use robots.txt to prevent them from going to a particular page.

Use Semantic Techniques or LSI for Your Writing

It’s always good to use variations of keywords such as phrases or synonyms that can relate to the primary keyword. For instance, if you have a website that is dedicated to engines, you want to have content and phrases in your content that relate to engines.

Maybe talk about some of the engines you deal with. Using these phrases here and there on your website is going to allow you to reinforce how relevant your website really is.

Getting to the Technicalities

You will need to have title tags that are going to be well thought out for SEO purposes. Make sure it stays below 70 characters and you should always use your primary keyword in the title. The main headlines in your page are the H1 tags and these should be descriptive and get to the point. Subheadings can also help your content flow a lot easier.

Social Equity: Blogging and Your Business

April 19, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Blogging was one of the incipient forms of social media marketing, and it adds a great deal of Social Equity to your business.

Considering the online attention span is only 8 seconds, it is hard to imagine how a lengthy blog article can be so beneficial when it comes to Social Equity. The fact of the matter remains, blogs address key issues, and if someone lands on your post, it is because you have already grabbed their attention and they want to know more.

Essentially, a blog is a lead generator. People are arriving at your site because you have information they want access to. And if done right, a blog can mean a tremendous increase in business and, subsequently, Social Equity.

The Power of Blogging

While any form of social media marketing is going to require an investment of time and resources, blogging requires a little bit more. Considering you are developing original, lengthier content, it is not surprising that you will need to ramp up your investment and efforts for a blog to function at maximum capacity. But the payoffs can be outstanding.

According to surveys conducted by the inbound marketing experts at HubSpot, blogs can be more powerful than any of your other social activities when it comes to generating business. Their findings showed that 92% of companies blogging multiple times per day acquired a new customer through their blog. And for those companies that simply have a relatively active blog – 57% of those businesses acquired a customer with it. Furthermore, 81% of marketers agreed that their blog was useful to business development and lead generation.

With regards to inbound marketing, perhaps the most surprising statistic was that companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that do not. When you consider the added advantage of social link-building, this is a very important statistic.

Social Equity of Blogging

As noted above, Social Equity is derived very directly with blogging. Furthermore, there is an indirect value added to your business from blogging.

With regards to the direct Social Equity, a blog generates leads and business. The ability to acquire new clients directly from your website means that the aforementioned investment blogging requires can be recouped from the direct impact it will have on your business alone.

The indirect impact blogging has on Social Equity is tremendous. Blogging, more so than any other form of social media marketing, enables you to establish yourself as an expert and leader in your industry. You know everything there is to know about your business. How can you show that to people before you acquire them as a client? Blogging is the best means of achieving this. Showcasing your value as an expert to your market is reflected in an added value to your business.

It is clear that blogging can do wonders for your business. With time and devotion, a blog can significantly impact the value of your business in a very positive way. Blogging is amongst the strongest methods of garnering Social Equity.

Have you seen a value added to your business as a result of blogging? How so? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

How Social Media Can Help Your Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

April 16, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media can mean big things for your business, and the numbers are there to show it.

Considering all the literature, statistics and case studies that exist to show how beneficial social media can be for your business, there are still marketers out there that are hesitant to adopt it. Whether it is a question of not knowing how to use it, or not understanding how to measure it, people still seem to be having a tough time crossing that last hurdle when it comes to implementing a fully integrated social media strategy.

Every second a brand does not have a presence on social media, it is losing out. There is an international conversation taking place and people want to hear from you! Don’t believe us? This infographic gives a short, sweet breakdown of just how active social media is and gives a good indication of how important social media can be for your business.

Read through the information and let us know which statistic you think is the most important when it comes to building your business through social media. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media: 5 Methods to Convince C-Level Skeptics

April 8, 2013/by Corey Padveen

When it comes to social media, every department may be sold on its benefits, but the most important folks in the room are the hardest to convince: executives.

Social media is an investment. Whether that investment is time, money, labor or something else, executives see it as an expense. And since the goal of executives is to keep a company as profitable as possible, it may not be an expense they are immediately willing to undertake.

Luckily, we have put together a compelling set of arguments to present to skeptical executives when it comes to selling the (very necessary) concept of social media. These five points should help any marketer cross that last hurdle before implementing a social media program and sharing a well-earned ‘told-ya-so’ at the next quarterly meeting. (NOTE: Probably not in your best interest to use those exact words at the next quarterly meeting. A well-organized report should do the trick.)

1. The ‘Leg-Up’ Argument

One of the easiest ways to show that social media is a necessary program is to show where your competitors are failing. We showcased 10 free social media monitoring tools in a blog post last week that you can use for some (very legal) corporate espionage. Listen in on what people are saying about your competitors and explain how this is information that can be used to give your brand a competitive advantage.

2. Scare Them (A Little Bit)

Though it seems hard to believe, there are still plenty of people out there who do not understand the power of SEO and social media. After all, not all executives rose through the ranks in the age of technology and online networking, and may not completely understand their awesome power. Ask them for five keywords with which they associate their brands. Type them into Google. Are they the first result? No? Their chances of being clicked on just fell 36% – and no we’re not kidding. Are they on the first page? No? Down over 90%.

We discussed some of the benefits of social media and SEO in a blog last week. SEO is still one of the most powerful ways of being found online. And even for those executives who do not believe or understand the power of social media, many know about SEO. Explain the added benefits to search rankings as a result of a properly executed social media strategy.

3. Show Conversations in Real-Time

This method is going to require a little bit more prep than the others. First, use any of the free social media monitoring tools we discussed in our earlier blog. Then, put together a profile of keywords that pulls in live conversations showcasing some leads that your company would be able to target with a social media program. This not only showcases the power of social media, but gets executives excited about implementing the program.

Last year, I was in a meeting with a real estate executive. I put together a very preliminary listening profile and, in our meeting, we pulled out three leads, one of which turned into a referral for the agent. Needless to say, they could not wait to dive into the program head on. Try it – these programs exist for a reason.

4. Present Case Studies

One of the most widely used arguments against the implementation of a social media program is that the results are unproven. This is always a baffling claim, because the evidence that these programs work is staggering. Before meeting with your executives, find some case studies for your industry (and yes, they exist for every industry) examine them and present them, in detail, at your meeting. Hard evidence of success is something executives are trained to look for, and practical examples are always better than theoretical ones.

5. Find More Than One Reason

You might know that the benefits of a social media program are virtually endless, but your executives might not. So, when you go into your meeting, give your executives more than one reason why they need social media. Though it’s obvious to seasoned social marketers, it is not as clear for everyone else.

BONUS: If you want a little push to get you going, set a few things up in the backend that can get your company started. These can be set up on your own time and include small, free listening programs, Google Alerts, or something similar. Having something in place will also help you get over that last hump before implementing a full-scale program.

Have you found any methods that help sell to skeptical executives? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media: Week-in-Review, April 6, 2013

April 6, 2013/by Corey Padveen

In case you missed some of the topics we covered this week, here is the social media week-in-review!

Pinterest Marketing: Need-toKnow Updates [INFOGRAPHIC]

With the recent Pinterest updates, there is quite a bit social marketers need to be aware of. This infographic does an excellent job of outlining what new features exist, what features have been removed from the photo-sharing network, and how marketers should adapt to these changes.

Social Media SEO: The New Backlink Strategy

When it comes to SEO, social media is of ever-growing importance. Link-building has long been one of the foundational pillars of successful SEO, and with a proper social strategy in place, you can take your link-building to the next level.

10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Success in social marketing is all about having an effective strategy in place, but tools can be a great compliment to your program. These 10 free social media monitoring tools can help you maxiomize your efforts in social marketing, and expand your reach considerably.

Social Media Case Study: Gillette

In 2010, with the World Cup right around the corner, Gillette wanted to attract a new customer base in Italy – males under the age of 25. They knew that social was important, and aimed to expand their presence in this new market using YouTube. The results were outstanding and we highlight some of the key lessons for marketers in this week’s social media case study.

Social Equity: Social Media and SEO

Linking your social media strategy to your SEO efforts can have dramatic effect when it comes to Social Equity. In this week’s Social Equity segment, we look at the value added to your business as a result of having highly correlated social media and SEO strategies.

Have a look through some of these great articles and enjoy your weekend!

Social Equity: Social Media and SEO

April 5, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social Equity stands to increase significantly as a result of the benefits social media has with regards to SEO.

The secrecy surrounding search engine algorithms has resulted in a great deal of conjecture when it comes to social media factoring into SEO. That said, allusions made by executives, such as Matt Cutts at Google, have led to inferences that social media is a major factor when it comes to optimizing your content for search engines. As a result, your brand’s Social Equity stands to benefit greatly due to the fact that SEO is still one of the most successful means of getting found.

In today’s Social Equity segment, we aim to show where Social Equity is derived from the incorporating of social media into your SEO.

Where Are the SEO Benefits from Social Media?

In order to understand how an intertwining of social media and SEO add value to your business, it is first crucial to understand where SEO stands to benefit as a result of social signals.

The chart on the left was derived from research conducted by Searchmetrics. What the data shows is how heavily social signals (data from activity on social media channels) weigh into rankings on search engines. (For the graph on the left, rankings in the U.S.) Last year, traditional link-building, one of the cornerstones of conventional SEO, had been surpassed by Facebook shares.

Essentially, social signals and sharing register with search engines as links (if, of course, what is being shared contains a link to your content or a landing page). Thus, as the popularity of social media continues to grow, the importance of factoring SEO into your social strategy grows with it.

This is where Social Equity comes into the mix.

Social Equity Derived from Social Media and SEO

A properly formulated SEO strategy that incorporates your social media will result in a tremendous value added with regards to Social Equity. This holds true for two reasons.

First, traditional SEO is an ongoing process that requires numerous man hours and ongoing expenses. With social media factoring as heavily as it does into the equation, you stand to save quite a bit of resources when it comes to your investment in SEO. Considering the strength of social sharing, the link-building process is both faster and collaborative. So there is a two-fold benefit here: both your audience and your search rankings are being built up as you invest in your social media strategy.

Second, for many verticals, SEO is still a major focus when it comes to determining market share. In fact, a study conducted by Optify showed that the top result on Google receive over 35% of clicks from a search. Social media activity allows you to rise through the Google ranks, and when you stand a chance to generate more than a third of all traffic for a given keyword (or better yet, multiple keywords) the value of your website and business as a whole stands to rise.

Traditional SEO is still of great importance to your business’s value. But when it comes to Social Equity and the value added to your business as a result of social activity, it is essential that you incorporate social media into your SEO strategy. Your shareholders will thank you.

Have you seen your search rankings rise since beginning your social media program? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media SEO: The New Backlink Strategy

April 2, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media is of ever-growing importance when it comes to SEO, and the power of social signals when it comes to link-building could supercharge your SEO efforts.

Link building has long been one of the most important features of an effective SEO strategy. Over the course of the last few years, social media has become all the more important when it comes to SEO, and recently, the importance of social link building has gained a lot of traction.

How the New Google Panda Updates Change SEO

It is first important to understand why social media backlinks are so important now more than ever.

Google recently updated their algorithm to incorporate some major changes to the Panda filter. Much like a real panda, the name and appearance of the Google update might seem harmless, but the truth of the matter is that if a site violates any of the conditions set forth in the update, Panda will attack the site, removing backlinks and penalizing the site in terms of rankings. So, what has the result been? Many site owners have seen dozens of links they spent precious time building disappear, and their site rankings have suffered as a result.

So the big question is, how can site owners make up for this change with social media?

How Social Media Boosts Your SEO

In an article by Richard Petrillo, he suggests that the “social vote/social signal” can revive your SEO. Tweets, pins, +1s and Facebook shares are the new backlinks, and because they are effectively personal pseudo-recommendations, they weigh quite heavily into your rankings.

As people read and share your content, others are exposed to it. This works out similar to building links on other sites, but the fact that social media is so personal (at least, that is the intention) the weight of social signals when it comes to your link-building strategy is much heavier.

How to Build Your Social Signals

The simple answer? Produce engaging content that your audience wants to share. Dan Zarrella, social media scientist at HubSpot notes that the optimal number of tweets per day is roughly 20. But he makes it very clear that if you share content with which your audience wants to engage, then that number is irrelevant. The best way to do this is to monitor your engagement levels and take note of the content that boosts your brand’s engagement.

Second, make sure your content is social media friendly. A fantastic blog post is a great thing, but if people have no means of sharing it, then you lose the opportunity of adding a new social link. So in order to capitalize on the power of social media link-building, make sure you incorporate social sharing into your content wherever possible.

Lastly, share your own content outside your site in order to build your own links. It is one thing to rely on others to help you build your social links, but help yourself out wherever possible.

Social media offers us a number of new opportunities when it comes to SEO. Through social sharing and building social signals, you can improve your rankings drastically and much faster than every before.

How do you incorporate social media into your link-building strategy? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media and SEO: 25 Important Tips and Hints

March 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

When it comes to SEO, social media is of ever-growing importance.

Social media is a major factor when it comes to SEO. In fact, within every one of your social networks there are small details that are referred to as social signals, and these are extremely important when it comes to improving your rankings.

One of the major differentiating factors with regards to social media when compared to other forms of search engine optimization is the fact that social signals are updated in real-time, and as such, your SERPs (search engine results page) can rise much quicker than they did with conventional methods of SEO. So, in order to ensure that you are being found on search engines, it is important to understand what factors contribute to your improved rankings when it comes to social media.

Below are 25 great tips and hints that should help you optimize your social media activities to factor in how your actions on social networks will impact your search rankings.

An engaged audience is the cornerstone of successful social media SEO; keep your audience engaged with your content and your rankings will skyrocket.
A big audience is nice, but a smaller, targeted audience is much better.
Your employees can be crucial to helping you spread your content across social media channels, which helps bolster your rankings.
Going “viral” is something that happens naturally, not something you can plan. (So don’t!)
Social signals are admittedly important to both Google and Bing.
Social sharing (i.e. Facebook share, re-tweet, Google +1) are more important social signals than direct signals, like optimizing your About Us section on Facebook.
Captivating images with Alt Tags are easily shared and great for SEO (particularly when it comes to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+.
Build your boards on Pinterest! These register as social signals but individual pins do not.
Of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, Google+ is the best network in which to engage with influencers in your industry.
Authorship authority on Google is important to improving your rankings, and a good way of doing that is with Google+.
Three important criteria for your Facebook EdgeRank are affinity, interaction and timeliness.
Facebook Graph Search (in these early stages) is most beneficial to the entertainment (movies and TV), fashion, restaurant, travel and hotel industries.
Twitter is an arena important to customer service – engage with your audience when they are reaching out to you and you will be rewarded in your SEO.
Create 5 different tweets for the same blog post.
Don’t be afraid to post tweets linking to the same content on Twitter more than a couple of times per day; your followers are not going to be watching everything you post throughout the entire day.
Keep creating content – the more content you create (both on social channels and on your blog) the higher your rankings will increase over time.
Engaging, share-friendly content should always be what you strive to post.
The most clicked content titles consists of: “How To”, “Do/Do Not”, “Top 10/25/100”, Tips, Reviews, etc.
Creating good titles for search engines is nice, but creating compelling titles that intrigue your audience is much, much better.
Links in SlideShare presentations can be crawled and registered with Google (as a social backlink – among the most powerful ranking criteria).
Google auto-complete is the feature most beneficial to registering your keywords.
Optimizing a mobile app/site/piece of social media content is a crucial feature to engaging with your audience, particularly now with Google’s Universal Analytics.
Be sure to optimize your website and all of your social media profiles (especially Google+) for your address; this will benefit your local rankings significantly.
When it comes to mobile search, the only engine that really matters (well, matters more than anyone else) is Google. (#AppleMaps)
Be active in the conversation! Optimizing social media channels and blogs for SEO are one thing, but to really see your rankings shoot up, make sure people are familiar with your brand (and you!) by engaging in the conversation online!

Overall, the one thing to remember is that in order for social media to factor into your search rankings, you need to have an engaging brand. And that works both ways. It doesn’t happen overnight. Social media might be a faster means than any other when it comes to driving traffic and increasing your rankings, but it still takes time and plenty of commitment.

How are you optimizing your social media channels for SEO? Have you seen any results? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

SEO Keywords with Google Analytics

February 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

SEO is one of the most powerful tools a brand can use to get found, and Google Analytics offers some great insights to help you maximize your SEO efforts.

We never tire of pointing the wonderful world of analytics that are offered to webmasters in the backend of Google Analytics. With a simple code, site owners are offered a wealth of insights when it comes to the search engine performance of their sites. Though all this information exists, few people are well versed in all that Analytics has to offer. The result? Missed insights that can be vital to the success of your website on search engines.

While it would not be possible to cover all that Google Analytics has to offer when it comes to insights in a single blog (there are multi-part courses that offer this) we thought we could discuss some of the tools webmasters can use to see how their websites are performing when it comes to keywords and search terms. Are you optimizing for SEO in the right places? Are the keywords you’ve chosen for SEO performing as well as you had hoped? If not, what keywords are the driving factor behind your SEO success?

Below is a set of helpful steps when it comes to both finding and using these insights for your SEO efforts in Google Analytics.

Where can I find these insights?

So, perhaps the most important thing we will need to know when it comes to using these insights is knowing where to find them. On your menu on the lefthand side of Google Analytics is a Traffic Sources tab. Under there you will see Search Engine Optimization and, beneath that, Queries. (NOTE: You will need to have Google Webmasters set up on your site in order to monitor these insights.) In the Queries section is where you will find the bread and butter of SEO keyword lists.

It is here that you will be able to start delving into the world of saved search keywords and see just how you are performing for those keywords you wish to rank for, and those that you did not even realize were a means through which people were finding you.

Isn’t that a treat?

Now that we know where we can find these keywords, it is important to understand what they mean with regards to our SEO, and how we can leverage this information to increase our rankings in search engines.

Analyze and Implement

SEO is an ongoing process. There will always be evolution in our SEO strategies, and this is one area that will show us how we should be evolving our SEO strategies in order to keep up with the market.

Once we arrive at the Queries section under Search Engine Optimization, we can begin to understand how we are being found on search engines. There are three means through which we can organize our search results: Impressions, Clicks, and Average Position. Impressions has to do with the number of times our site (homepage or landing page) has appeared in search results for a given keyword or phrase in a set period of time. Clicks has to do with the number of times people have clicked through to our site as a result of a searched keyword or phrase. Lastly, Average Position ranks our keywords based on, you guessed it, the average position in which our site ranks for a specified keyword or phrase. The table looks like this:

Taking these statistics into account, we can begin to see where we are performing best. Say, for example, you run a restaurant, and you optimized for “southern cuisine” in your initial SEO run. Well, say a few months after your launch, you notice that the majority of your clicks and impressions are coming from searches for “southern barbecue” as opposed to what you had initially optimized for. This will lead you to reevaluate your SEO strategy, and begin optimizing for a new set of keywords where you are seeing your highest return. Upon your next visit, you will see that not only have your impressions and clicks risen, but your average position will have gone up as well, as a result of your re-optimization.

Have you used these insights for your SEO in the back of Google Analytics? How so? What have you found to be the most beneficial way of using them? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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