How to SEO your social media assets

By now you probably have a number of social media profiles created such as Twitter, Facebook Page, Linkedin profile, SlideShare account, etc. Although these are not located under your domain name, it is important that each one of those profiles is properly optimized to be found on Google. This post is about ways to SEO your social media accounts and overall social presence.

First of all, anything you put out on the web is indexed by Google (unless your profile is part of a private social network that is closed from Google and Bing bots). So, let’s approach it two ways:

1. Optimizing your social media profile for SEO
2. Optimizing your social assets for SEO

SEO for social media profiles

There’s a number of great articles written on the subject of optimizing your social media profiles for better SEO performance in search engines. So, I’ll just reference the good ones here.

• Tips to make your Twitter profile rank by Matt Leonard
• Tips for optimizing your Twitter profile for SEO by David McClellan
• Presentation on SEO for Linkedin Company Page by PJA
• How-to guide and a case study at SEOmoz by apiwarun
• Facebook as an SEO tool at Pubcon by Aaron Kronis:

There’s a lot of other great resources that I recommend you look for. Just Google things like [youtube (or other social profile) profile seo tips] and you should get a lot of cool info on each social media profile you’re interested in.

SEO for social media assets

Again, anything, and I mean anything you put out there will be indexed by search engines like Google (unless it’s a closed social network). So I recommend you pay attention to optimizing any piece of content you are distributing. Some quick examples include:

• Images on your Facebook Page
• PDFs to Scribd
• Power Point presentations on Slideshare
• Submitting articles to StumbleUpon
• and others.

Each one of those resources has meta data that is important for both internal (network’s own search tool) and external search (Google and Bing). Therefore it’s key to ensure your files are properly described for people and search engines. Let’s take one of my latest presentations that I put out on SlideShare.

SlideShare SEO example

I recently ran a course at Higher School of Economics in Perm. It was an internet marketing module for a ContEd marketing group of students. After the lectures I would upload the slides to my SlideShare profile so my students can grab from there.

Within a day after submitting the presentation I got over 100 views. My group was only 15 people. This means that 85 people were able to find my presentation within a day from its release.

Let’s look at what I did to get to these stats within a day from my internet marketing presentation submission.

• Title: The title is of appropriate length, starts with keywords (internet marketing) and is descriptive.
• Description: The overview of the presentation is like a snippet that tells a user what it’s about. I ensured that my other sessions with this marketing group of students had unique descriptions.
• Category: I chose the Technology category because I was talking about internet marketing, so the presentation was relevant to searchers in those specific categories.
• Tags: I tried not to overdo the amount of tags. I used single-word attributes to explain what the presentation covered.
• File downloads: I turned the file downloads on. Although I don’t think it affects SEO directly. But it definitely offers users more options to interact with my presentation.

By the same example I recommend you optimize any asset that goes out through your business profiles on social networks. Feel free to check my earlier post on SEO for PDFs. Ensuring that your docs are found on Google and through internal search is important for increasing the number of leads your materials generate.

10 experimentally proven ways to build links

For some time now I’ve been trying to systematize the process of link building. I just ran a quick experiment on some of my friends / competitors: Anduro, Foundpages and Vovia. As they say, “check what competition does and do better”. This post shows a process I used to define link-building categories as well as a list of these categories. This should help people who’s tasked with on-going link building.

My link building research methodology

1. identified top 3 competitors for “online marketing Calgary“
2. ran all three of them through Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound links from outside domains)
3. saved the TSV files for each of those competitors
4. merged all three files and added two more columns (links to, type of link)
5. went through the list to remove duplicate domains
6. ended up with a list of over 400 sites linking back to my competitors
7. identified the links in one of the following categories

Link building categories identified

• Clients and Partners: this one is self explanatory. Whenever you do a project or partner with somebody ask if they could place a link to your site on theirs. Make sure your anchor text is in order. You can event cut some cost of the project to get that link. However, if you’re thinking of doing it, make sure their site has a significant pagerank (anything above PR4 is good).
• Offline participation: Take part in industry events (as a speaker) or organize your own. Either way there will be link building opportunities. For example, bigger events usually send out an email blast with speakers bio. Ask if you could include a link in that bio, especially if you can anchor link to your site (text “Online marketing expert” linking to your site).
• Online participation:
  • join industry forums, ask questions, give answers, comment, participate. Building links form blog comments has worked well for me. Just make sure you provide quality feedback in your comments. Use StumbleUpon to find relevant blogs to comment on. Don’t overdo it though. Balance with other link building practices.
  • do guest posts: there are plenty of group and individual blogs in your industry. Come out as an expert and write an article in an area of your business. Approach the blog owner and as to contribute with an article. Don’t forget to include properly formatted anchor text in your article. Don’t overdo with the number of links to your site inside the article. 2-3 links is plenty.
  • share your content: if you’re blogging on regular basis, make sure you 1) make sharing your articles easy, 2) you share those article with your network on Twitter, Faceook, StumbleUpon.
• General directories: these are directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, etc. Some are paid, some are free. Just make sure that a listing has an option of linking to your site. Linking with anchor text is ideal.
• Geo-specific directories: Google values local connections. There’s probably a lot of directories in your locale. Make sure you are there. I’m looking at my competitors and they’re in most of the local directories.
• Thematic directories: Doing a quick Google search for ” “your indsutry” AND “directory” ” will probably give you a list of directories in your specific industry. They will be from all over the world but they will be theme specific. Engines like when your site is on the list with other relevant resources.
• In the media: One of my competitors got mentioned in a very powerful news source. Think industry specific (Mashable, TechCrunch) and geo-specific (Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun). If you have a news worthy story, I suggest you connect with your local reporters on the topic. Even if you don’t think you have a story, still connect, find out what the trends are and what the reporter is writing like. Make this connection! (courtesy of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi).
• Link-bait and quality content development: It’s a great sign when others link to specific posts on your site. Engine love that and they thing that your site has developed natural authority among like-minded people. Having a link from a relevant site is worth a lot, so I suggest you invest time into quality content development.

I hope that all makes sense. Feel free to let me know what other proven ways you found useful.

SEO resources to stay up to date

Any professional to be of any value to his / her clients has to be up to speed with what’s happening in the industry. I just had an urge to share a few SEO resources I follow on regular basis to stay up to speed. Feel free to add these resources to your Google Reader (I recommend creating a separate folder for all things search marketing).

• Google Webmaster Central
• Google Analytics Blog
• Blog by Matt Cutts
• ClickZ, internet marketing portal
• Ask Enquiro, focusing on B2B Search Marketing
• Search Engine Land, SEO Portal
• Search Engine Roundtable, SEO Portal
• Search Engine Guide, SEO Portal
• Daily Blog by SEOmoz
• Marketing Jive, formerly SEO Space

There’s definitely way more websites about search engine optimization, tips and trick, etc., but I assure you that if you follow the ones above, you’ll be up to speed with what’s going on in search marketing world.