Social Media Tactics

For those of you who have read my blog in the past, you know I love to give quick tips on search engine optimization and web marketing. So as not to disappoint anyone, here’s a quick list of Dos & Don’ts for your social media campaigns (you ARE including social media in your online marketing, right? If not, find out how to get started in social media.)

1. Don’t go into it just for the links. You’ll get shot down by the community instantly. Social media is all about conversation and creating advocates for your brand, so share and engage in the conversation. Active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences.

2. Give your visitors a voice. Social media gives consumers some control and a voice. If your site doesn’t include a way for visitors to comment on or rate your content, you’ve got some work to do. A static web site that’s one-way (the visitor can only read it) won’t cut it anymore. Interactive sites are the norm these days, so you need to join the 21st century.

3. Join in on the top social activities. These are currently watching videos and sharing photos. In addition to posting and sharing on YouTube and Flickr, consider adding video and photo sharing to your own site, if appropriate, and create videos that can be shared (see Video Optimization). Just be careful with Flickr. They are cracking down on accounts set up by companies and deleting them. They only want personal use of their service.

4. Social media is NOT a substitute for SEO or PPC. Social media optimization must be integrated into your complete marketing plan.

5. Great customer service. This is a natural outlet to social media. Visitors can leave comments or questions on your site or on other sites like Facebook and you can respond. It is essential to monitor the various social outlets, not only to provide service, but to head off any problems or complaints before they build into something difficult to manage. Among the many tools that I use are Google Alerts and Tweetscan to send me alerts for Google and Twitter mentions.

6. Lock down branding. Combining SEO, PPC and social media can be great for this. Great rankings in the organics, advertising and social presence are a dynamite combination.

7. Grab your Twitter name. Twitter is incredibly powerful for weighting in the serps so use it! Just be sure to grab your name before someone else does!

8. Link to your profile pages. Make sure visitors can find your social site pages. Make your first weighted link to your profile pages a link from your company site.

9. Treat your YouTube videos just like HTML pages. In other words, give them a title, description, tags and make sure the very first thing in the description is the URL you want folks to land on.

10. Last but not least. If you don’t know where to start, go for videos and move on from there. In addition to YouTube, videos can be distributed and shared through Metacafe.com, Yahoo Videos and scores of others. Heck, even Flickr has video now.

Keep in mind that many of the top traffic sites these days are social media sites and that Web 2.0 is really about empowering users, not promoting you. And, take note that social search is different than web search because in social search, it’s about sourcing information from trusted people as opposed to general information that is dished out by a search engine.

Once further tip – using cloud tags can give you an idea of what is generating conversations as well as alert you to trends. I use one on my own blog, but there are a ton of other WordPress tag cloud plugins available.

Until my next list of inspirations, good Internet marketing!

Tags: facebook, flickr, optimization, social media, twitter, videos, youtube

Importance of Diversity in SEO

I’ve discussed image and video optimization in my various S E O 101 posts and free eBooks, so I thought I’d point out some quick examples of how a variety of content can give you a kick start in search engines in this world of Universal Search.

Many of you know that I do search engine optimization for FramesDirect.com as well as manage and edit their blog, which is high on eyewear fashion, celebrity sunglasses and so forth. Our readers love to get scoops on who’s wearing what on TV and in films, so when the new Iron Man movie came out (great flick, by the way), we started getting questions about what sunglasses Robert Downey Jr. wore in certain scenes. In the opening scenes, Downey is wearing Ray Ban 3320 sun glasses, so I wrote a blog post on it appropriately titled Ray Ban 3320 Sun Glasses in Iron Man.

At the same time, I posted an image of those Ray Ban 3320 sun glasses on Flickr, complete with a title, description, tags and links back to the blog post and product page at FramesDirect.com. When you post an image at Flickr and include a title, tags and description, it’s like posting a web page which is spiderable and can be indexed by the search engines. The links are “nofollow” but the pages can still rank and bring you traffic.

Since Google drives the most search traffic, optimization tends to favor it, but we have all discovered that the different engine rankings can vary wildly. Including images, as well as videos, podcasts, etc., can help you rank across engines.

Below is a screen shot of a Yahoo search for “iron man sunglasses” where you will see the blog post ranking at the top as I write this. Cool!

In Google, the blog post doesn’t rank on the front page at all, but the Flickr image does at #7:

See how important it is to diversify your content across the board? Granted, #7 isn’t as good as #1, but because the different engines have different algorithms, diversifying your content types across different media (text, images, videos, podcasts, etc.) you get ranking opportunities you would not otherwise have.

And, as a bonus (not shown), a Yahoo Answers question that I answered about what shades Downey wore in the movie came in at #8. Again, the links back to you in Yahoo Answers are nofollow, but they can still bring you traffic. More exposure! Even better if your answer is chosen as the best!

If you’re real lucky, you’ll get something like we got recently for a search in Google for one of our top selling products:

Results #1 and #2 are pages from the FramesDirect.com web site, #3 is a video posted on YouTube featuring company CEO Dr. Dhavid Cooper, #4 is a New York Times article featuring the goggles and linking to us and #5 is the same video as #3 but posted to Metacafe.com.

So, be sure to cover your bases. My rule of thumb is that whenever I do a blog post, I take all of the elements of it and find search friendly places to do supplemental (but not duplicate) posts that can link back to it. These places include Flickr, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Twitter and the FramesDirect.com Fan Page over at Facebook. This is by no means an all inclusive list, just a few places to get started.

Diversity is the key!

Tags: blog, flickr, google, images, iron man, optimize, podcast, robert downey, search, SEO, sunglasses, yahoo

Living With My iPhone

I’ve had my iPhone for a few months now and it has seen lots of use. I’ve carried it in my pocket everywhere I go, including on almost daily three-mile walks where it doubles as an iPod. It served as my pocket journalist and photographer at SMX West and it has been my personal and business telephone (no more land line for me).

So, here are some of my observations for this amazing little communications device. You might also want to read my initial iPhone review or watch the iPhone review video.

For those of you who think that Apple products don’t know what the three-fingered-salute (that we Windows users have become so accustomed to) is, think again. The iPhone has locked up on me several times over the past few months. This really surprised me the first time, but the iPhone is, after all, a computer.

To do a hard boot to get the phone working again, there is a two-fingered salute. You press the sleep button at the top right of the phone and then the home button at the bottom for a few seconds. The iPhone will reboot and get back to business. One thing to keep in mind is that when the iPhone locks up, it keeps draining the battery. Mine apparently locked up after I ended a call one day and I didn’t notice until I got home a couple of hours later. I rebooted and found my battery almost dead.

Granted, it’s only two fingers for the iPhone. Guess that’s a little improvement.

There was also a period that I couldn’t get YouTube videos to play. I can only assume it had to do either with an Apple software update (they’re almost as frequent as Windows updates) or a side effect to doing the hard boot mentioned above. After a little research, I turned on Airplane Mode for 15 seconds then off again and, voila, the YouTube videos were playing once more!

I used this baby a lot at SMX West in Santa Clara. It was still pretty new to me then, so I was finding out what it could and couldn’t do well. For instance, I used the camera to take photos of the sessions. In good light and up close, the camera is really very good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do so well in low light and could certainly use a zoom function. I just couldn’t get close enough to most speakers for anything but distance shots.

But, what was really impressive was that as soon as I took a few photos, I could use the iPhone e-mail client to send them for instant posting to my Flickr account with titles and descriptions, while the session was going on! According to the SMX West conference site, I had the honor of posting the very first photos from the conference. They weren’t the best, mind you, just the first.

It became addictive. I found myself sitting up front in every session and address that I attended to grab some photos, send them to Flickr and then start writing my blog coverage on my laptop. I could get the article written, use the Flickr photos I had already uploaded to illustrate the article and be published within minutes, frequently right as the session ended. I started out as a journalist way back in the 1980s and I can tell you that this is a dream come true. Absolutely fantastic!

I could also Twitter quick notes out to my followers, including those subscribing to my blog RSS feed since I have the feeds connected. SMX West provided free WiFi so I had a good connection, but I could have still managed with the really slow Internet access provided by AT&T.

At home or on the road, I can catch up on my SEO feeds just about anywhere with the iPhone. Even without the rumored forthcoming broadband Internet access, I can pull up Google Reader in Safari and read the latest from my favorites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and SearchNewz. You’ll see me sitting at many a coffee counter with my nose in my iPhone. For me, this is one of the handiest features.

And, I love the iTunes integration. I don’t buy a whole lot of music, but I am subscribed to a ton of SEO podcasts and listen to them religiously on those three-mile walks. I hate when The Daily Searchcast isn’t, well, daily! (Hope you’re reading this, Danny).

In a nutshell, the iPhone has become a very important part of my daily life. As I mentioned in my initial review, it’s not perfect. I’d still like a real keyboard, broadband Internet access and a way to share that access with my laptop when needed.

But, it’s one Hell of phone/iPod/camera/Internet appliance…well, you get the idea.

Tags: apple, camera, flickr, iphone, ipod, podcasts, SEO, smx, telephone, twitter