Are You Optimizing Your Social Media Profile?

Questions are frequently asked with regards to how social media and search engine rankings can be used together. In fact, I wrote an article on this subject a while back, in which I asked a few search engine marketing experts their thoughts about where social media fits into the SEO equation.

The general consensus seemed to be that social media is a good channel for people to discover your content and link to it on their blogs and sites. But what about just getting your Twitter page ranked on Google? Some think that social media profiles could take the place of corporate websites. If this is the case, you would certainly want your profile to rank well.

An article from Source Square looks specifically at SEO for the Twitter page. The author of this article details the five steps outlined here:

1. Use search engine-friendly keywords in your Twitter name.

2. Use reader-friendly keywords in your Twitter name.

3. Use keywords in your "more info" URL

4. Flood your one line bio with keywords (while maintaining natural readability)

5. Tweet quality contents, and build lots of links

In a recent interview with WebProNews, Dana Todd of Newsforce, who is a board member of SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), talked about how social media frequently accounts for up to half of the top ten search results on Google for any given query. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the optimization of social media profiles.

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It stands to reason that similar tactics to those listed above could be applied to Facebook pages as well (or other social networks). It’s all basically just good old fashioned SEO practice. Keywords, quality content, and links. You probably think about this for your website, but it is often overlooked on social media profiles.

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Interviews to Come

The SMX Advanced conference is coming up next week in Seattle, Washington. It will take place on June 2nd and 3rd, and WebProNews will be there to cover it both days.

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WebProNews readers can expect interviews with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft on a variety of topics including what’s in store for the future of search for Microsoft.

The latest trends and seo and social media will of course be discussed as well. Stay tuned to WebProNews for tips and interviews in the form of articles and videos next week, and beyond.

Any particular topic you’re interested in hearing about from the event? Let us know.

Dos and Don’ts to Improve Google Ranking: Ranking Factors, Good and Bad

Among SEO professionals, there isn’t always consensus on precisely which and to what degree site factors contribute or detract from rankings on Google because the factors actually vary by industry. There are indeed, a number of contentious issues: markup and content quality, use of title tags, site organization and even arguments that Google Analytics data factors in to site rankings. Not likely (yet), but certainly up for debate among SEO professionals.

However, there are some Google ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on Google SERPs. However, these are opinions, find out for yourself how these apply to projects you’re working on.

Recommended Steps to Improve Google Ranking

1. Use keywords in HTML title tags. Probably the most significant factor for a site regardless of the competitive landscape, the title tag must be consistent with content in the page for best results. The more keywords in your title, the less effective this factor, be judicious.

2. Create quality anchor text for inbound links. At one time, according to some SEO professionals, quality anchor text was an essential component of a well-ranked site. After all, this is the text the user opted to see by clicking a link on another site. Most SEOs still contend that quality anchor text is a highly significant, positive ranking factor. If not for spiders, for visitors clicking in as well. Obviously the text should be relevant to the destination page for best results; that’s where your on page optimization comes in to play.

3. Increase link popularity. Link popularity takes into account the number of inbound links present. Link authority has less relevance, though it is still a factor depending on the competitive landscape. Link popularity is based on a global count of links from all sites. However, quality links are still critical to creating site authority; authority means ranking for more phrases than you intentionally target.

4. Hang in there. The age of a site is an important positive weighting factor according to many SEO professionals. It’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Failed sites are dropped as soon as the hosting subscription ends. If a site has been around for 10 years, the owners must be dong something right, especially if link popularity is steady developed over the years. Unfortunately for site owners, there’s no way to speed up the aging process – except hanging in there.

5. Increase the popularity of internal links. These links direct visitors to helpful, related content. They’re important in providing visitors with a positive on-site experience. Search engines view on-site link popularity as a sign that visitors like what they see and want to learn more.

7. Build deep links. Deep links are relevant to the topicality of the target page or keyword. The relevance of these inbound links matters to a site’s Google ranking. However, please note point 3. The sheer number of inbound links is a factor as well. Quality deep links carry more weight and add credibility to a site.

8. Connect with sites selling to the same demographic. Create a number of links with sites within your topical community. This helps visitors further their searches – something Google likes very much.

9. Keep old links. Google looks for web stability. The older the link, the more trust it has. It indicates a happy relationship with the site owner linking in who recognizes the value of sending visitors off-site. Google watchers suggest a three to four month time window for spiders to determine that this is a well-established, long-term link that has value to visitors of both sites.

10. Use keywords in body text. Make sure that keywords receive prominent display in headlines, headers, sub-heads. It’s important that the keywords used in HTML text on page match with keywords used in the site’s meta data and title tags.

Not Recommended

1. Don’t use session IDs in URLs. It sounds like a good idea on the surface, an easy way to track customer information, but here’s the problem. Each time a spider crawls the site, a new URL with session ID is created. The spider now has two, or three or more URLs all showing duplicate content. Go back to Go, do not collect $200. Don’t confuse this with pages that may have a couple GET variables in them; avoid that when you can, but just avoid having your pages containing session IDs.

2. Choose a reputable web host. The most potent negative ranking factor is server accessibility. If your server, located in Timbuktu, is inaccessible to spiders, it’s inaccessible to visitors. Down time soon becomes down and out time.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Googlebots employ filters to detect duplicate content. Now, if you opt to post some syndicated articles, you’re providing a service to visitors. However, a bot will recognize that content (it’s already appeared on 400 sites) and you’ll see a drop in traffic rank.

4. Jettison low-quality links. Google assesses the character of your site by the company you keep so keep good company by unlinking from (1) links farms, (2) sites with absolutely no quality content and (3) otherwise low-quality sites; e.g. FFA (free for all) sites.

5. Avoid any kind of links deception. Googlebots aren’t smart, but they can detect some paid links and a variety of links scams, including generated links. If a Googlebot suspects links fraud, your site may be penalized and sent to the basement or banned altogether.

6. Avoid a log-in before visitors and bots access “the good stuff.” Log-ins can easily confuse a bot who won’t be able to access quality content hidden behind a log in. Even though users with Google toolbars will be unknowingly suggesting new URLs to be crawled as they surf about, having teasers for the content your monetizing by subscription will help your SEO.

7. Avoid using frames. Horizontal and vertical framesets <frameset> are commonly used by designers to present more than one page of a site on the screen at the same time. However, frames are also bot traps. They can get in but they can’t get out, making it impossible for them to index a site – at all! Tell your developer to look at using iframes if possible or absolutely necessary.

8. Avoid duplicate title/meta tags. Title/meta tags are a valuable resource for site owners to expand access points to a site. Using title tags ensures that more pages are indexed and listed in Google’s SERPs as distinct links. All good. Unfortunately, too many duplicate title tags on pages in which the content topic hasn’t changed, is redundant and a waste of the bots time. Use tag your pages uniquely and judiciously.

9. Do not keyword stuff. Even though search engines no longer give much weight to keyword tags, keyword stuffing continues. Select 20 to 30 keywords – top-tier and long-tail – and focus on them. Keep keyword density in body text at no more than 3%. The old 5% rule still led to on-site gibberish – obviously these figures vary by competitive landscape.

10. Do not let quality slip – even for a day. Spiders crawl sites with greater frequency and sophistication and index updates are common as changes to a site are implemented. During periods of construction, be sure to keep spiders out of staging areas that have yet to be completed <nofollow> or block with robots. These works-in-progress may cost you points in the ranking sweepstakes.

Google controls 46% of all searches. Doesn’t it make sense to give this search engine exactly what it wants and delete what it doesn’t want?

Rhetorical question.

In search of a do-it-yourself Wall-E

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How Do Google’s New Search Options Affect SEO?

Google’s search options were designed to allow users to refine their searches. That means users will use these to weed out irrelevant results and better find what they’re looking for.

It also means that there is a whole new set of guidelines that search engine marketers will need to think about…or does it? Perhaps it’s just the same guidelines, only emphasized to the user more now, thereby making it more important than ever for marketers and web site owners to consider them. How do you intend to handle your SEO efforts with the new changes? Tell us about it.

I asked a few search engine marketing experts if they think the options will affect SEO. Here are a few responses I got:

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea says: "Web Options have the potential to impact SEO by offering a much wider range of ways to find information. Whether or not they will may have to do with whether or not searchers will take the time to click on the ’show options’ link, and explore the many new ways that they can find what they may be looking for."

Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing says: "Yes! But it doesn’t change the SEO advice we give: fresh content, digital asset SEO…"

"From what I am seeing, the ’search engine optimization’ industry is actually turning back around to what it used to be: good old fashioned website marketing," says WebProNews Blog Partner Bill Hartzer, commenting on an SEOmoz post.

"It’s not only ‘optimizing a website’ and ‘getting links.’ SEO is involving more nowadays: you have to get your site in front of real people and real traffic," he continues. "It’s also about using social media marketing techniques, as well. If you’re successful in social media you’ll be successful in search. If you can get lots of real people to a site then you’ll be successful in SEO."

In other words, it’s all about optimizing for people. That’s all the search engines have ever wanted, and that’s all the searchers have ever wanted out of content – to be able to find what they’re looking for. It’s easier said than done, but all you have to do is help them find you.

So considering that, why not take a few moments to examine just what these new search options are that are available to users. Let’s think about what it would take to have your site show up for each option.

Videos

Obviously, ranking for searchers using the video option is going to require the use of video. Though online video adoption has certainly grown substantially in the last year or two, many are still quick to doubt its importance despite the search engine ranking implications that have been discussed in the past. To me, it looks like it just got even more important, given that sorting by videos is the top option in Google’s new search options (just below "all results" – the default option).

Based on several test queries, it looks like it’s going to comedown to relevant keyword use with videos. Whether that be with videos on your own site, YouTube, or other locations. Doing video interviews with other content providers will likely work in your favor here as well.

Within the Videos option, you have the sub-option to see videos of all durations, short ones, medium-length ones, or long ones. This tells me you will probably do well to produce videos with a variety of different lengths.

Forums

The next option is to sort by forums, and this appears to be another obvious one. Participate in forums. It just so happens that I

discussed online forum participation about a week ago. To me, it’s just part of the overall social media marketing package. Forums might as well be social networks, whether they are called so or not. Now that users can easily search Google by forum results, it makes more sense than ever to participate and gives you a better chance of promotion.

Just like any other form of online marketing, ethics should always be considered. It’s not going to make you look good if you just go into a forum and spam it. It’s about participation. Discussing topics related to your business should provide the natural flow of keywords, and potentially help you rank well in this section.

Reviews

In my test searches, "Reviews" results seem to come from pages that indicate that they are just that – reviews. This leads me to believe that you want to get your product reviewed as often as possible, or conduct reviews of other products on your site in order to show up in these results. It also tells me that you want reviews to be clearly marked as such. This tells Google that they are in fact reviews. On a sidenote, this might be a very important option to monitor from the online reputation management standpoint. If people are out there reviewing your product, this is a good place to see those reviews.

Sort them by date, and you will be able to see them from the most current, which will help you keep up with new ones. Just hope that whoever is reviewing your product is clearly marking their reviews as reviews. Pages in these results tend to say the word "review" on the page or in the title tag.

Sorting Options

Google gives users the option to see results from the past 24 hours, the past week or the past year, in addition to anytime. They also give you the option to sort by relevance or by date – a long overdue option if you ask me, and one that has been available on Google News for quite some time.

I would say that these sorting options indicate that frequent content and updates are in order if you want your content to appear here. How else are you going to rank for time-sensitive results?

Images from the Page

Users have the option to have their results show images from the page right on the SERP. This option (at least in some cases) brings up different results than if the option is not enabled. I’m going to have to make an educated guess and say that providing plenty of relevant and optimized images will help your cause when optimizing for this search option.

More Text

Under the "Images from the Page" option is the "More Text" option, which basically just provides the same results as a regular search, but includes longer snippets. I think this is just going to comedown to classic use of keywords and just good-old-fashioned good content, because just like any other snippets, keywords are bolded.

If there are more keywords within a longer snippet, that means there will be more bolded words, which could make the result stand out, but if that good-old-fashioned content isn’t surrounding those keywords, they will be worthless because now the user will have more to read before they click through to your site. If it’s not relevant to what they’re looking for, they have a better means of realizing it before the click.

Standard Results

 

More Text

Related Searches

As with the sort-by options, I’d say frequent content again is key again here. Optimize for items that are related to other topics you rank for. Basically just optimize for a broad spectrum of topics related to what you do while staying relevant (btw, being deceptive will hurt you in the long run, ranking or no ranking).

Wonder Wheel

Similar to the related searches option, the Wonder Wheel gives the user a way to navigate through related searches in a more visual way. It’s a graphical representation of related search terms, though they are not always the same as the ones found in "related searches." From an optimization standpoint though, I would say the same tactics would apply here.

Timeline

The Timeline groups results by dates referred to on actual pages. What this says to me is: include dates in your content when relevant. Another good thing about this is that it gives you the opportunity to get older content viewed, and in its right context. If users are using the timeline and select older dates, they’re most likely looking for content from that period.

This reflects better on your site than if your older content was showing up in a regular web search, where a user might be confused into thinking the content is more current than it really is, which could ultimately have a negative impact on your reputation depending on how time sensitive the data is.

Wrapping Up

To be clear, these are just theories. To the best of my knowledge, there is no concrete answer for how to get ranked in any of these sections. We are after all talking about ranking on Google. I feel like these strategies will only increase your chances of getting found with each option though. It comes down to providing what people are looking for. Search options from Google should be applauded and embraced, because as a content provider and/or a business, you also have more options with regards to which Google results your content will be found in.

Also, keep in mind that paid listings still appear in the results for these options. The same paid listings appear regardless of which option is selected however. And don’t forget that users have the ability to use multiple options at the same time. For example, reviews can be listed from most recent to oldest.

Do you feel that search options will help or hurt your chances of potential customers finding your listings? Do you like the features or do they irritate you? Let us know either way.

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