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.

How to use Twitter? Client training preps

I’m preparing for a client training session. The client manufactures custom furniture in Perm, Russia. My task is to train marketing coordinators on how to use Twitter and the business and marketing value of it. The client already has some understanding of Twitter, but he’s skeptical. The following questions are coming from this client:

• Why would anyone want to tell everybody what’s happening?
• What are some examples of businesses using Twitter successfully?
• How to use Twitter for business?
• How to use Twitter for marketing?
• How to use Twitter effectively?

The following is my train of thought for this presentation. I want to hear your opinion, so please share in the comments. First and foremost, I want to get the Twitter intro right. Explaining why a business should use Twitter is key in this case. Here’s what I had in mind for this section:

1. People talk about things they like, their experiences (excluding stupid status updates).
2. There are people who have common interests with you / your company, they are willing to listen.
3. They want to listen to opinions of others on the subject and meet people with similar interests.
4. Even if you doubt you have something to say, you have a product to sell.
5. Talk about your product, why you’re selling it, what’s good about it.
6. Talk about your product with passion, aim to share, not sell, those that look for it will find you.
7. Reach out to others with similar interests, make connections, start conversations, and keep listening.
8. As you share your views or products, people will start asking questions.
9. Respond to those questions and ask how you can help.

Once the foundation is built I plan to talk about Twitter case studies and showcase a few local companies and how they used Twitter to start the conversation with their audiences. If you have a case to share, please let me know, I’d appreciate that!

Finally, after the foundation and case studies material is delivered I’ll move on to talk about how to use Twitter. I’ll discuss setting up the account, setting up HootSuite, creating topic monitors. We’ll also get into some terminology, but it’s probably going to be in a form of a glossary that they can take home. Then, I’ll close with a discussion of a few best practices of using Twitter.

At this point I just want to make sure I got the “How to use Twitter?” part right. Does this make sense? Will this make sense to a novice user? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

20 best SEO blogs analyzed

A while ago I’ve shared a number of SEO blogs you should follow to stay up to date on the latest developments in SEO industry. Then, I’ve created a list of top SEO Twitter accounts that fulfills a similar function. This time I wanted to find more details about top blogs. This will allow you and me to see what we should strive for looking at the 20 best SEO blogs analyzed.

I looked up the first page of Google for “top SEO blogs” and “best SEO blogs”. I got two great sites where Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan shared their top 10 blogs in SEO. I also got a couple of bigger lists here and here. Then I merged the lists and made my own 20 best SEO blogs analyzed.

This resulted in an extensive spreadsheet that features a number of website characteristics. And I decided to share the list with you. You can use this list to:

• Start following these great SEO blogs
• Play with the columns to see what matters and what doesn’t
• Check the bottom line numbers for top SEO blogs
• See what factors (DMOZ list, domain age, etc.) work for each site

Can I train you or your team to get higher rankings?

Real-time search, real life problem

One of the key questions I get when discussing social media with businesses is: how can we see a result of a social media benefiting companies. Here’s one of numerous examples of how public perception, real-time data and tools like Twitter shape the new future for marketers.

This is real life, real-time case that’s happened to me over the past hour. I use Shaw as my ISP and about 30 mins ago, the thing stopped working. Tried rebooting the modem (often a solution suggested by ISPs). Didn’t work. So, I wend to search.twitter.com on my Blackberry and typed “shaw internet”. Got the following:

Twitter comments: Before Shaw solved the problem

* Please note that this is an image that was taken through a web browser on my machine once the problem was resolved. But I saw exactly the same when I browsed mobile.

This is real-time, real life example of social media shaping the future of digital marketing. Public has a say. If you screw up as a business, people will know. They will also spread the word by sharing or RT (re-tweeting) to help others form an opinion about the quality of your service. We share, we contribute, we, the public, form opinions of masses in real time, using real tools.

This snapshot was taken when the situation was resolved by Shaw. Although people are getting happier, there’s still a bad aftertaste on Shaw’s brand name showing between the lines.

Twitter comments: After Shaw solved the problem

Twitterville by Shel Israel, short marketing book review

Finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago. Very simple read. This book can help two types of people:

1. those who want to know more about Twitter and how it’s affecting our daily conversations and lives.
2. those who are already in the social space. Shel presents a couple of chapters talking about processes, tips, and a bit on metrics.

I would subscribe to the second group and prefer a bit more specifics. However, I enjoyed reading the book for its stories and how well it’s written.

Living ahead of time with Twitter

As I’ve been using Twitter more often recently I realized that Twitter is posting ahead of my life. Here’s what happens: I post on twitter, (because I created a twitter feed right into my blog), I see that the message I just posted on twitter is 7 hours old.

I checked the time standard my twitter is on, I also checked the time on my WordPress install. Everything shows proper Mountain Standard time but my tweets are still happening ahead of time. If somebody had this problem I would greatly appreciate if you can share the solution you found. Feel free to use comments on my blog.

On the other hand, it’s pretty cool, the way things are, I’m living in the future. I would assume that I can change things before they happen :). This is crazy.

Kevin Spacey about Twitter with humour

Gosh, wanted to post this video long ago but could not find the time. Kevin Spacey is explaining twitter in plain human language with humour! Hope you enjoy it!