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.

21 tips to quit smoking, thank your friends and family

I smoked for 10 years. Two weeks ago I quit and feel much better. Below is a list of things that may help you to quit smoking. Feel free to add more to the list in the comments to this post. Here we go…

1. Don’t get ready, just quit. Don’t think, just do it!
2. Read the book by Allen Carr called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking
3. Tell your friends and family that you quit.
4. Don’t confuse “I’m quitting” and “I quit”. It’s done. Stop doing it. Stop thinking about it.
5. Tell your colleagues that you quit smoking.
6. Blog about it, pretty much the same way I’m doing it right now.
7. Chew some gum. I heard Nicorette helps.
8. Use patches. I tried Nicoderm, helped to get rid of physical cravings.
9. Create a Facebook group around your quitting. Make an event out of it. Courtesy of Karine Vartanova. 
10. Think of all the positive things that you will gain as a non-smoker.
11. Think about all great things you are missing out on as a smoker.
12. Think of it in a way “smoking is for kids”. Courtesy of Robin Eldred.
13. Consider the diet: “Tips from Andrew Weil’s anti-inflammatory diet and food pyramid will help you a lot. Most of my cooking is now based on the ingredients in this pyramid:  http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART02012/anti-inflammatory-diet” Courtesy of Alex Gault.
14. “Make sure that you eat lots garlic, ginger, red peppers and turmeric. All have powerful anti-inflammatory powers, and consuming them will accelerate the cleansing of your system of nicotine — making it easier for your body to cope.” Courtesy of Alex Gault.
15. Twitter about the process. Here’s what I’ve been doing here @zagoumenov. People that follow up, even professionals, are people too and some of them have quit. My twitter friends have been very supportive.
16. Think of life. “Yesterday I ran and made it to a peak heart rate of 184. For my age it is clinical death by a lot of beats. With clogged arteries, from siruppy nicotine, that would have been certain death. Yo have a choice . . live longer and keep your arteries clean, live shorter and enjoy smoking . . . . vse budu horosho, in both instances we end up death, so what’s the big diff?” Courtesy of Tim Hartel.
17. It may hurt, but consider meeting less with your smoking friends and more with your non-smoking friends. Try it for a little bit until you get rid o cravings. Once cravings are gone, go crazy with your smoking friends.
18. Once you quit, help others quit. It’s like learning by teaching. The more I teach, the better I know the subject.
19. Once you quit, you quit. Don’t screw things up by just having one cigarette. You are a non-smoker now.
20. “The best way to quit smoking is to stop smoking.” Courtesy of Robin Eldred.
21. Avoid drinking companies for a little while. For many people alcohol and cigarettes are complimentary products. So, stop drinking alcohol for a few weeks

Good luck! You CAN do it! When you quit, thank your friends for support. The closest people will get hurt the most. Thank them big time! I want to thank Ulyana, my better half.