By Jill Whalen

Each year around this time, I like to review the traffic trends to our High Rankings website, and compare the traffic to the previous year. I usually learn a lot from this exercise, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Thankfully, with Google Analytics it’s very simple.

Some of the things I look at are total number of visits to the website, as well as the number of visits to certain sections or pages of the site. And of course, I especially like to look at which keyword phrases drive search engine traffic.

Because our site is all about SEO, in addition to learning how we’re doing with our own optimization and overall online marketing initiatives, I can also learn about overall trends in the industry. High Rankings has a number of authoritative articles on fundamental SEO techniques that are typically ranked #1 or #2 for the keywords that relate to them. In fact, those articles tend to have more page views than any others on the site.

Today I thought I’d share some of these insights with you. Please remember that you have to take these “trends” with a grain of salt because many factors could be at play beyond just what people are searching at Google.

With that said, here are some statistics for you, with my commentary on what they might (or might not) mean.

For this exercise I looked at just Google visitors, rather than all search engine visitors, because it was easier to filter the data that way. Our overall Google visitor number was about the same in 2008 as it was in 2009 (–0.24%), which is good for purposes of looking at the trends. If we had substantially more or fewer Google visitors, the numbers of visitors based on keywords would be skewed because of that. Read more…

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Link building doesn’t have to be all about begging. Try building relationships and self branding instead.

Ask just about any SEO what their least favorite part of search engine optimization and a lot of them will give link building as the answer. Begging for links from authority sites is no one’s idea of fun. Rejection feels so, well, rejected!

Building organic links to your site is something that we’d all like to put on auto pilot as much as possible. There are ways to do this, but they can be different depending on whether your site is brand spanking new or a seasoned veteran.

So, we’ll divide these tips and suggestions into two parts: New Sites and Established Sites.

Read more…

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Twitter has become an important communications tool. Here are some tips to optimize your tweets.

Who would have thought? I have to admit that when Twitter was first launched, I was one of those folks who thought it was downright silly. Who cares that you’re sitting in a coffee shop texting a 140 character status report? Sheesh. Bound to disappear in a few months…

Wow, was I ever wrong. Twitter has taken the world by storm, providing communications for everything from patriots in repressed regimes to emergency information services. And, yes, you’ve still got those nerds tweeting about sipping a latte at Starbucks, too. Oh, well…

Twitter has been a natural magnet for SEOs and Internet marketing tweeple, er, people.  Twitter allows an unprecidented way for an individual or company to get immediate insight from around the world, allow you to break out of your social group (follow friends of friends, industry leaders), grow your channel of distribution and build your brand.

Here’s a list of twips, er, uh, tips to make your tweeting twouble fwee, ah, er, uh, trouble free! Read more…

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Social news sites are about content for the reader, not self promotion.

This is part two of my series on Optimization for Social Media Integration, this time covering social media news.

The top two social media news sites today are Digg and StumbleUpon, so I’ll concentrate on these. However, Propeller.com, Reddit.com, Mixx.com (do-follow links) and Buzz.Yahoo.com are all worth a look.

The main thing to remember about social media sites is that the news on these sites is chosen by the users, making popular items even more so because bloggers look at this content for cool, link-worthy stuff and then re-post or write about them. The stories get great visibility and natural editorial links. In addition, the content is targeted, making it great for boosting your ranking and authority.

In brief: Digg utilizes outside voting, requires LOTS of votes for an item to go popular, generating less illegitimate content. StumbleUpon features toolbar voting, send page to a friend ability (which pretty much forces a view) and even includes the option to buy more views at a whopping 5 cents each.

Here are some general guidelines to make your social news more popular and to provide those nice surges of traffic to your blog or site. These spikes can be fantastic! Read more…

By Richard V. Burckhardt

SEO and Social Media optimization are pretty much integrated these days.

As promised, though delayed a bit, here is the follow-up to SEO & Social Media Integration with some tips for optimizing your social media and integrating it into your overall SEO mix. Naturally, the more social links you have, the more you’ll be noticed (Hey, I’m here!) and linked to and crawled, natural SEO in any book.

• Complete your profiles and put your web site or blog URL in ALL of your profiles. Including your web site link should be a no brainer, but LOTS of folks forget this. Social content is definitely showing up in search results. For instance, a search for my name in Google comes up with several of my profiles (LinkedIn, WebPro News, Plaxo, etc.)  as I write this. Include jobs, use keywords, never turn down interview or podcast opportunities that can be included.
• Check industry trends through services like Google Alerts. Jump into breaking subjects with blog and social media posts.
• Promote blogs, social media and RSS feeds of those who link to you through your own RSS feeds. This has a viral effect that sends more links to you.
• Develop a series of “How to” videos and post them on video sites like YouTube (now 25% of Google searches). People LOVE these and will embed the videos or link to them. Post them on your own blog and in the social sites, too.
• Content is king on Twitter, just like in standard, run of the mill SEO, so use keywords and hashtags (like the #bsg tag for Battlestar Galactica fans).
• Utilize Facebook fan pages. These can have unlimited followers and can be optimized.
• Subscriptions are gold! Social Media Content = Subscriptions + Links!
• Transcribe your podcasts and post them on your blog.  Include keywords and links.
• Create widgets that will pull your RSS feeds from blogs, social media and news feeds. As a rule, links in RSS feeds are direct links without redirection or the dreaded “nofollow” tag!
• Re-optimize blog posts after their “shelf” life. Rework them and monetize them for breaking subjects. Any given blog post URL or page has history and links, so update them to keep current, ranking and posted in the social media.

OK, as always, these just scratch the surface, but you can see the optimizing for SEO and social media are pretty much one and the same these days. What you do with one totally effects the other.  Anyone who thinks they can be an SEO and ignore social media is, well, NOT an SEO.

Next up: Optimization for Social Media Integration: News

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Take a look at the following and see what you think:

• Create great content, including articles
• On page optimization
• Links from authority sites
• Get content on industry sites, providing contextual links
• Get noticed in Social Media
• Get noticed in search
• Get into niche sites

Sounds like the basics of SEO, right? Well, these apply to Social Media, too. Any SEOs out there who are still avoiding the Social Media bandwagon are, well, stuck at the bus stop without a token.

Social Media and search engine optimization have become so integrated that you can’t really separate them anymore. Social sites like Twitter, which many of us laughed at when it first came out, are pushing a revolutionary shift in how information is found on the Internet because they add interaction and community to the equation. In addition to the basics above, they throw in features like:

• Participation
• Voting
• Comments
• Friends
• Trust

That last one, Trust, is a BIG one. Social sites are working more like search engines these days and there’s a huge difference between they way they dish out results and the way the search engines do. The social sites look at what your friends think about a subject and their results are based on that. You trust your friends, right? A perfect example is Twitter search. It’s based on tweets from folks you can check out and follow or who can follow you. And, look out Google, it’s really fast! And, it’s immediate. You can catch what is happening right now. Wanna see what the fans of Battlestar Galactica are tweeting? Check it out in real time (Or, if you’re a real Twit, check out by the hash tag #bsg).

The search engines dish out results based on the trust of folks you don’t know (PageRank, back links etc.).

Which begs the question, will trust kill the algorithm?

So, think of Social Media sites more like search engines that can help your visibility in, well, search engines.

Confused?

Don’t be. It’s simple. The more social links you have, the more you’ll be noticed and linked to and crawled. It works pretty much the same way as SEO.

Next, Optimization for Social Media Integration. Look for this post soon!