It was magic. It was innovative. It was fun.

It had power! Thousands of musical artists and acts got their careers started with music videos and a lot of forgotten acts were rediscovered. For example, a simple weekend marathon of the old Monkees TV show resulted in the once trashed group getting together for what turned out to be the biggest summer tour of the year 1986. New records by the group, more reruns and the rebirth of a made-for-TV band followed.

But most of all, MTV was exciting!

That’s where I see social media today. Like MTV in the beginning, social media is all of the above with innovative features being rolled out right and left and the ability to connect with folks around the world 24 hours per day. It’s like magic!

But, again, most of all, it’s exciting!

And, it’s now a part of SEO, which some have also likened to magic.

Unlike MTV, which was one-way, social media is about interaction. You connect with folks who connect with other folks and everyone provides user generated content and links that help bolster your SEO, traffic and conversion goals. You do this through photo or video sharing, news and networking sites as well as blogs.

There’s the power!

And, like the young MTV viewers of the 1980s, social media users tend to be cutting edge, comfortable about innovation and technology. Using sites like YouTube, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us, etc. just comes naturally.

So how do you tie your SEO efforts into all of this excitement and power?

1. Tune in regularly. Join some of the social media sites and commit to participate every day. Yep, it’s very time consuming, but there are no shortcuts.

2. Have a hook. Like an MTV VJ, learn what is popular in each specific community and segue your content and participation in that direction.

3. Be anonymous. Just as you voted for your favorite MTV videos using different phone numbers (remember that?), don’t make it obvious that you are promoting yourself. That’s a big breach of etiquette. Promote from a different IP and account. Get your friends to help. If your office is participating, be sure they all cast their votes and submissions from home and NOT on the office IP. Too many coming from the same IP address can get you into trouble.

4. Become a groupie. Connect with influential users of the service. Later, take a look at their friends and see who else might make good connections.

5. Vote for your fave. Cast votes for good, quality content, not just yours, every chance you get and Stumble at the same time.

6. Have variety. Let’s see…rock or rap? Submit quality articles, content or videos from a variety of sources. If all you do is submit your own, you’ll be labeled as a spammer or your submission will just get killed.

7. Promote. Got a new gig? Social networks are great for introducing your blog to your network of friends.

8. Get subscriptions. We’re not talking 16 Magazine. Social news traffic is short term. What’s on the front page is gone tomorrow, so to keep some of those viewers coming back, get them to subscribe to your feeds.

9. Use Twitter! No, Flock of Seagulls hasn’t released a new album. Twitter is what you’d call a mini instant messaging system. I have to admit that when Twitter first came out, I thought it was kind of silly – 140 characters to alert your friends about what you were doing? Didn’t make a lot of sense, but it sure does now. Tie your Twitter account into your social accounts to let people follow you automatically. For instance, you can use a WordPress Twitter plugin on your blog called Twitter Updater to automatically send a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit a WordPress post. A similar web-based service, Twitterfeed, can be used as well. Facebook has a Twitter application that you can install that will feed blog entry status to your Facebook status updates. Twitter is also great for customer or visitor communication. Feel free to follow The Web Optimist on Twitter.

10. Name the band. Register your company profile on all of the social networks. Grab your company name as quickly as you can to prevent someone else from doing it and pretending to be you.

Where to go from here? Once you are established as a reputable social media user, you’ll find that connecting with the Linkerati, influential social media linkers, bloggers and journalists, will be easier. Your doors will open wider. Hey, make a video!

So, it’s an exciting time to be in social marketing and SEO. Let’s just hope social media keeps its focus on what it is and doesn’t do an MTV on us.

I miss my MTV!

Social Media & SEO: I Want My MTV! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

I suspected something funky earlier this week. I set up an account for my client, FramesDirect.com, and uploaded a rather large feed, something like 25,000 products (hey, it’s a huge site with LOTS of eyewear products). According to Live Products, which is much like Google Base and even will accept a Google Base feed, it can take up to 36 hours for the feed to be live. This was on Monday and late Friday night the upload still showed “processing” as the status. Thirty-six hours, huh?

No word yet on what is happening.

Hope I didn’t break it.

Update: OK, Live Product Upload appeared to go back up around noon Pacific Time. However, the feeds I uploaded on March 10 are still showing “processing” today, March 15.

Again, so much for the “36 hours” mentioned on the site. You’d think if there were problems with the feeds, which have to be refreshed every 30 days, Microsoft would at least alert me to them.

Sheesh. I know it’s free, but most aggravating.

Update #2: Whoops! Checked at 5:15 p.m. Pacific time Saturday and it’s giving that Runtime Error again.

Update #3: Looks like it’s back up, but it’s been seven days since I uploaded my client’s feed and it STILL says “processing” in the Product Upload control panel. I filled out the feedback form requesting an explanation at Day 6, but no word back yet.

Up to 36 hours my ….

Update #4: Turns out Microsoft did respond. I found it in my spam folder, but the remedy is a pain and might turn into a major project. Google Base feeds are supposed to work with Live Product Upload, but now I’m being told to cut the feed into smaller chunks and see if that works. The feed is something like 25,000 products. This is pretty lame, Microsoft.

Update #5: I split the feed into two and uploaded both over a day ago. I’m looking at the Live Product Upload control panel now and it shows these and the two earlier March 10th full uploads as still processing (I’d delete them, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do so). This is getting old…

Update #6: …really old. Splitting the feed into two equal parts had no effect. Still says “Processing” as do the two feeds I uploaded on March 10. If we have to split this baby into a dozen pieces to upload it every month, we might pass. I sent an e-mail back to Live Product Upload support. I’ll let you know what they say.

Update #7: It took two weeks, but after a few e-mails to support, the tech folks at Microsoft got the feeds up and live. Now that they’re up, I need to make some changes and upload again. Problem is, I’m getting that Runtime Error in ‘/’ Application error again! Sheesh!

Live Product Upload Down is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Online retailers face more competition than ever these days and, with the onset of blended or universal search, on-page optimization just won’t cut it anymore to get pages ranking at the top. Although site architecture is still important in your overall SEO strategy, today’s search results are filled with a variety of resources besides web pages.

For instance, take a look at a search for “The Monkees” on Google (hey, I’m a child of the 60s and I dig The Monkees!):

So, what is the first question you need to ask about your online retail site? Easy.

Will it blend?

Blended search is about different ways, actually, opportunities to get traffic to your site, not just about site architecture. As an example, an all Flash site would not be a good idea for a retail site. Spiders still can’t read Flash. However, add a blog and some feeds to that Flash site with images, good textual content, videos and so forth, and you’ll cover a lot of bases that your site would otherwise miss for coming up in blended search results.

Blended search gives you chances to pull traffic in ways other than your product page rankings. Your images, videos, books, news, feeds and audio files can get you traffic and back links from all types of places on the web.

So, where to get started?

1. HTML SEO basics are still important. Create quality content in all forms – textual, graphical and video. See my post S E O 101 for beginning optimization steps.

2. Videos help in search engine results. Multiple videos can actually show up in the top 10 rankings and have a high click rate.

3. Get social. Ratings, reviews and comments from social sites can show up in the top search engine results. Build relationships in sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

4. Create a MySpace video page. As with #3 above, participate in the social scene.

5. Show them how. “How to…” searches are very popular. Create a video for your specialty or product and put it on your own site as well as on YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo, etc.

6. Name your images and graphics. Use captions and ALT attributes when possible. Include brand, product, number, etc. See my post S E O 101: Image Optimization for more tips.

7. Always, always, always include a picture with your products. In addition to a higher click rate when an image is present, sometimes products won’t appear in feeds that pop up on various sites if they don’t have an image associated with them. Make your images available for Google Image Search (through Google Webmaster Central).

8. Feed them. Product feeds can be pulled from various sources all over the web. You want your products to be among them. Start out by uploading a feed to Google Base and MSN/Live Product Search. Both are free. Once you’re comfortable with the way product feeds work, try paid feeds like ShopZilla or Yahoo Shopping.

9. Match product titles in feeds with what is being searched for most often. For example, are there more searches for something general like “Ray Ban aviator” or are most queries for something more specific like “Ray Ban 3025″ for your products?

10. Manage your seller ratings. Shopping feed distributors like ShopZilla.com and Dealtime.com include ways for customers to rank their experiences with companies selling through them. You want yours to be as high as possible as these ratings can be a factor in how high your products rank on these sites.

And, probably my top recommendation would be to remember that you are creating all of this for the consumer, not the search engines. Write for the user in an easy to read format that makes sense. Become a reference source for your products so that site visitors will refer to you, link to you and come back to you.

Search results are like a good milkshake. The better the blend, the better the result.

And who doesn’t like a good milkshake?

Online Retail Optimization: Will It Blend? is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO