SEOptimise » Social SEO

What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

Gillian Cook — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:25:03 +0000

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh. A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

How Google Search Plus Your World Will Impact SEO

Marcus Taylor — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:28:56 +0000

You’ve probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search yesterday, dubbed ‘Search, Plus Your World’. There has been vast speculation about Google’s motives, with the most credible of which suggesting it’s to do with…

Gaining market share in the social network market.
To improve the quality of search results through increased trustworthiness and personalisation (research by Nielsen suggests that 42% of people trust search results, but 90% trust recommendations from friends).

In reality, all of the above will contribute to why Google’s launched social search. However, in this post I don’t want to talk about the politics – I’ll leave that to the tabloids. I want to talk about how this is inevitably going to impact our jobs as SEOs.

What’s Google’s Game Plan With ‘Search, Plus Your World’?

To really understand the impact, we need to realise what Google’s game plan with social search is. I’ll point out now that I’m not an expert or an insider in any way, but this is where I think Google might be going with Search, Plus Your World and Google+.

Google is creating a ‘map’ similar to Facebook’s Open Graph that connects people with their content, websites and readers to understand who produces what content, what happens with that content and how people react. This is where the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags play a big part (I wrote a post about this on Social Media Explorer).
Google will then learn contextual information about readers and content producers taken from their Google account activity (e.g. what YouTube videos they watch and searches they make when signed in) and use this data in combination with existing ranking factors and G+ sharing data to better place content in search results.

If I’m right, then I can see a shift in prominence in the SERPs to content producers with an active audience, but only in niches where communities exist.

For example, in the social media niche, sites such as Mashable, Social Media Explorer and Social Media Today will receive extra prominence in SERPs because they have an audience containing not only the ‘influencers’ but also the remaining mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content. The social media sites that don’t have an active audience or community will lose prominence.

In niches where there is no community (think ‘septic tank maintenance’ or ‘zinc coating of ships’) social search won’t change anything, at all. That is unless a company creates an active audience from scratch – for example, how Compare The Market arguably created an active audience in the insurance niche using Aleksandr Orlov.

As I never wrote a ‘2012 predictions’ post, here are five things I think this shift towards social search will make us think about more as online marketers.

Email marketing will become increasingly important due to the power it has to encourage desired actions, such as social shares. I am currently writing a post on SEOmoz about using email auto-responders to influence social SEO – hopefully it should go live in the coming week (follow me and I’ll tweet it when it does go live!)
SEO strategies will have two sub-strategies: the ‘personalised SEO strategy’ and the ‘non-personalised strategy’ – the latter of which will be almost identical to what you’re doing already, but the former being more about gaining social approval and engagement from your audience.
Low quality link building will become obsolete in niches where communities and active audiences exist. High quality link building will still play a major part in ranking for all sites, low quality link building will still work for uncompetitive niches with no audience.
Companies will need to find ways of gaining the ‘social approval’ of influencers in their niche (if such a thing exists). +1s from your niche’s celebrity will be the social equivalent of the .edu/.gov link.
Google will work on increasing the proportion of people who are signed in. That one’s just obvious :)

Conclusion

It’s fair to say that Google+ and social search will inevitably impact SEO this year. To what extent we don’t know, whether Google decides to make the ratio of social:links as a ranking factor 1:1 or 5:1 or 0.1:1 just isn’t possible to say yet, but my advice is prepare for the worst case scenario and you won’t regret it, because it’s something that will only increase in importance over time.

Of course, this is all my opinion and if you disagree with me I’d love to hear about it and build a fuller understanding of all sides of the story. As usual, share your thoughts in comments below!

Image Credit: Birgerking, vanmarcianoart.

40 Google +1 SEO Resources

Tad Chef — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:31:44 +0000

By now I’m quite weary of the manifold failed attempts by Google to enter the social media arena. We had:

Google Answers
Google Bookmarks
Google SearchWiki
Google SideWiki
Jaiku
Google Wave
Google Buzz

to name just the most known failed or abandoned Google social media services. As with most of the previous offerings, last week’s Google +1 started in a clumsy beta or rather alpha version. I didn’t even want to test it at first, but then all the search and SEO publications frantically reported about it so I felt compelled to give it a try.

I encountered many difficulties, and it took me two hours just to “get it”.

Google +1 is way too complicated right now and it was quite buggy when I tried it over recent days. The Google +1 page itself redirected me to 404 pages in German (I’m in Germany) despite browser and Google preferences.

When Google +1 finally worked for me, I tried to use it extensively but to no avail. Nobody has noticed my +1s it seems, and I barely see any by others.

Still, everybody is writing about it and the list of resources is already huge. Furthermore, there are high profile people in the SEO industry who actually suggest we jump into it. So to provide a more objective resource, I decided to compile the links and to enable you to make your own choices.

Google +1 on and by Google itself

How to use Google +1

Analysis and overview

Opinion (pros and cons)

Google +1 SEO resources

Miscellaneous resources

Google’s +1 Button (links)
Press Coverage: Google’s +1 underwhelms agencies
Google +1 is a scheme. (humorous/paranoid take on +1)

So I guess you can’t ignore Google +1; but equally, you don’t have to hurry up and amass +1 votes even though Google announced that they will count as a ranking factor (in contrast to Google SearchWiki, for example).

One year from now will see whether Google +1 is still around, and even if it is, whether it’s actually alive and not used only by bots.

The Facebook Like button depends on the biggest social network there is. There is no Google social network and there is no such thing as a search network; even Blekko relies on Facebook Likes to socialise search results.

So the +1 button must offer something of real value to succeed at all. Only significant traffic and Google ranking improvements will motivate webmasters to introduce it along with the Facebook and Twitter buttons.

Keyword Density – Finally Useful for SEOs and Penguins

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:29:48 +0000

As it’s a Friday afternoon and we’re all winding down for the weekend, I thought it would be an appropriate time to reveal a lighthearted tale involving keyword density, penguins, and Sambuca that I recently admitted to the SEOptimise team – something terribly shameful…

A story of why keyword density is in fact not dead.

A few friends and I were playing the infamous ‘Happy Feet drinking game’ whereby each player is assigned a frequently mentioned word that whenever they hear whilst watching the film Happy Feet has to drink a shot. I was assigned the word ‘fish’ (which I wrongly assumed wouldn’t be mentioned very much).

It was at that point that my geek instincts kicked in and I went to Google to download a script of the movie. I subsequently inputted it into a keyword density checker to identify the most frequently used keywords in the film so that I could strategically assign the most frequently mentioned words to the friends who I felt deserved the most Sambuca!

So there you are, whoever said keyword density is useless? It’s only useless when optimising websites :-)

How to kick start your Friday with some Keyword Density Drinking Games:

1. Pick a film with characters renowned for frequently repeating specific words. My recommendations: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Gordon Ramsay’s ‘The F Word’.

2. Download the subtitles for the film & input the text into a KW density checker.

3. Assign the most frequently mentioned words to those who deserve the most revenge.

4. Play! Enjoy.

How to Use Yahoo Pipes To Track Potential Questions on Yahoo Answers

Kelvin Newman — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:13:31 +0000

This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.

I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Yahoo, not only are they seen by most people as a bit of a joke, largely the stick is unwarranted. They’ve got some great little products and services, two of which I use to this great little way of keeping tracking of easy social media interaction opportunities.

The main service is Yahoo Answers, its a hugely popular social site where users ask and answer questions. If you’ve not checked Yahoo Answers recently, go over now and have a look, there will be dozens of people asking questions related to your industry – no matter how obscure or niche it is.

The nightmare though is having to revisit the site everyday to see whether there’s anything new or relevant. Fortunately the main categories have RSS feeds so you could set up the feed in your RSS reader to keep track of the mentions in your chosen category, but your a busy digital marketer, you don’t have time to check through every question asked on the site. That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in.

If you’ve never heard of Yahoo Pipes don’t worry, nobody has. It’s simple tool which allows you to do some very simple filtering and sorting of web data like RSS feeds. It can do some pretty clever tricks but what we want it to do is really simple. Take a feed from Answers, search for any questions that contain your keywords, discard those without and deliver those that do into a new RSS stream.

Start by dragging and dropping the a fetch feed icon from the side bar into the main screen. This will then create a box with a text field. Cut and paste the feed url from your most relevant category in Yahoo Answers. If more than one category is applicable click the addition/plus symbol and it’ll add a new text field for another category.

Next click the Operators expanding button in the side bar, find the filter button and drag and drop it between the Fetch Feed Box and Feed Output. It’ll have a text field you can type the word or phrases you want to monitor for. The drop down fields give you flexibility whether you want to look just in the Question Title and/or description Etc.

You can add more than one keyword by clicking the plus symbol, it gets quite clever now as well, you could filter questions that include SEO and PPC or you could set it up for questions that include SEO or PPC. It’s pretty self explanatory when it’s in front of you.

Now you need to connect the feed to the filter and from the filter to the out put. Click the circle and the bottom of the feed fetcher and drag it to the start of the filter, then do the same from the filter to the output. It should look something like the picture below.

Nearly there now, just save the pipe and hit the ‘Run this Pipe’ button. This will take you to a page where you can subscribe to this new feed. But I’m too lazy/busy to check my feedreader daily, so I take it a step further and use FeedMyInbox to take the feed address and email me whenever there is a suitable question.

Clever time saving trick which with a little tweaking you can use on dozens of social sites with RSS feeds. Do you monitor any social sites like this? Any tips to save time checking back for opportunities?

The Top Search Marketing Posts This Week

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:16:58 +0000

It’s been an eventful week in the SEO blogosphere, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicting the future of real time search engine indexing, to Yahoo flushing millions of dollars of Geocities PageRank down the drain! Here’s a collection of this weeks top search marketing and social media links from around the blogosphere:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about 'the biggest challenge of the age'

SEO:

Google Web In Five Years – Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about how ranking real time social media content is ‘the biggest challenge of the age’.
Pitfalls to avoid when carrying out international SEO – Some great tips to keep in mind when carrying out SEO work for an international client.
Google’s additional discovery method – Search Engine Land talks about how Google has a updated it’s web page discovery method using RSS and Atom feeds
Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo.

Social Media:

Proof that social media is killing print magazines – An interestingly presented blog post showing how declining print press publications coincide with the rise in people seeking news online.
Googles trial and error social media strategy – SEOptimise’s blog post from earlier this week on the success and failure of the various Google services.
6 Crucial steps to prepare for real time search integration – Six great tips on how you can prepare for Yahoo’s real time search integration with Facebook and Twitter updates.
11 Ways to get more comments on your blog – Eleven ways to increase the number of comments received on your blog posts.
Missed SEO opportunities – An enjoyable case study for any SEO on how an online costume retailer recently missed a seasonal opportunity by having such a poorly optimised online presence.

Twitter Friday: StumbleUpon is not Twitter

Tad Chef — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:32:02 +0000

Today I almost forgot to write my Twitter Friday column. Why? I was so preoccupied with the new relaunched StumbleUpon version. To make it short: SU attempts to compete directly with Twitter and Google. This might sound ridiculous but they really do. Theoretically it would be possible: SU exists for several years and has collected tens of millions of web pages in its “index” together with millions of reviews with new sites being added very quickly. Isn’t this the ideal social search engine? Isn’t this the perfect way to determine which websites really do matter in real time? Sadly, no.

Now this is the Twitter column so I won’t compare the new StumbleUpon to Google. Let me explain though why

StumbleUpon is not Twitter and can’t compete with Twitter.

StumbleUpon does not allow business usage of its site. Yes, you can get banned solely for submitting your SEO company website to SU.

StumbleUpon both prohibits self promotion and stumbling of commercial services. I’ve seen many legit and prolific SU users and bloggers outside of SEO getting banned for stumbling sites containing a small commercial aspect.

You must understand that before using SU. Many new users assume they can act like on Twitter and

represent their brand
submit their own postings
promote their offers

You can’t do it unless they have changed the TOS with this new version and they haven’t as far as I know. The only allowed business features of SU are stumbling sites dealing with business topics or paid advertising (sponsored stumbles) on the site.

I repeat: You are not allowed to present your own services on StumbleUpon.

There are many reasons why you aren’t: First off SU is an old school social site, meant for private users and not businesses. It’s similar to all the social sites of the first generation like Digg, Reddit or even Delicious who consider business users trying to promote something spammers by definition. Also these sites are not opt in so indeed it wouldn’t work. On Twitter only people who actively decide to follow you get your updates so you won’t have anybody complaining about you tweeting about SEO.

Instead of complaining Twitter users can simply unfollow you and never again read your Twitter updates.

While StumbleUpon is not the stupid one size fits all social news site Digg and Reddit still are on SU people see your stumbles via the toolbar who haven’t subscribed to you. They have subscribed to a topic not a person. You can subscribe and befriend people too but the toolbar stumbles are send to strangers as well. They get sent to friends of friends of friends. It happens automatically behind the scenes.

Twitter on the contrary is “what you see is what you get”, no shady sending random stuff based on proprietary schemes. Don’t get me wrong: I love the way StumbleUpon sends me stuff I might like and I often do, nonetheless I also get some content theft “funny images” blogs served etc.

There are people on StumbleUpon who will really hate you just because you submitted something they don’t want to see. Just read the angry reviews of many sponsored stumbles. Twitter in contrast is much more civilized because people choose to read about your business.

There are two more huge problems with StumbleUpon: It heavily relies on a flawed categorization and your friends don’t count.

On Twitter you tweet about a certain set of topics and corresponding people follow you: For instance people interested in SEO follow me. These people appreciate my SEO tweets plus they tolerate or sometimes even like my occasional off topic tweets. On SU it’s not that simple. The people who subscribe to the same categories as me (SEO, search, marketing e.g) might get my stumbles via the toolbar). When I stumble something about bicycling, Asia or cell phones the same people will not see it at all unless they subscribe to these categories as well. This would still work fine but it doesn’t as roughly 50% of all stumbles get miscategorized. I have seen the most bizarre miscategorizations.
Often the category is based on some word in the headline. Articles containing the word “improve” often end up in the “self improvement” category even when they describe how to improve your wireless network. So

many stumbles don’t get attention at all

because the wrong people see them who either don’t care for the issue or even hate the topic. You can’t really fix wrong categories. I send several requests each day to change them but most never get changed as the small SU team obviously has to deal with the reports manually. Even if it does change it takes ages and by then the initial stumble power has disappeared. The faster people stumble the more popular a submission gets usually.

Twitter is straightforward: You follow and befriend people and the more of them or the better your connection with them the more people you reach. On SU your friends votes don’t count. Only if strangers vote for you as well you get real traffic. So in a way the more friends you have in a niche the smaller your chances to get popular are because the less people who care about the topic get their vote counted.

So all in all StumbleUpon is the opposite of Twitter and not suited for business usage.

From the business perspective it can’t compete with Twitter at all. From the SEO perspective Twitter already sends more traffic in many cases than SU, especially if you submit stuff dealing with SEO a topic only a tiny group of users on SU has subscribed to.

In the new SU design you can see the number of “views” any submission has. This just reinforces my impression that most of them don’t get any views at all. Just look at screenshot above showing my discoveries. Please note that I’m a SU power user for more than 2 years and having 800+ subscribers. The SEOptimise post on the screenshot is an exception, I shared it with my friends via the toolbar so they had to see it.

In 2009 you can’t ignore or ban business users, the most succesful social sites allow both business and private usage.

30 Twitter Tools for Business

Tad Chef — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:32:59 +0000

How do you use Twitter for business? This question has been answered manifold times. What tools do you use for business though? There aren’t that many business tools for Twitter it seems. You rather should ask:

Which tools enable professionals best to use Twitter for business?

This way you may find more useful tools and apps. Nonetheless there are some valuable specialized Twitter tools for business you should try. I compiled a list of both, Twitter tools for business and professional Twitter tools. Most of them are free but some advanced ones, especially in the CRM arena are not.

Desktop Twitter Clients
Many people use the Twitter homepage for tweeting. Indeed I do often as well but for many tasks, especially in a business context an advanced client indispensable. I have tried a dozen of them and these three are among the best for professional users.

TweetDeck, perhaps the most popular professional Adobe Air client for Twitter. Supports, searches, groups, multiple accounts
SeesMic is like Tweetdeck but less buggy and with a more polished interface. TweetDeck never really worked on my system.
Statuzer is similar to the above but with added multimedia support

Web Based Twitter Clients and CMS
Even with a desktop client like one of the above working in teams is difficult. Web based tools offer even more features for teams and companies

HootSuite, a web based Twitter CMS for companies
coTweet (Twitter CRM?) – coTweet has been hailed as a Twitter CRM app but it’s basically a Twitter CMS with very basic CRM features
Twaitter allows team accounts, scheduled tweets, RSS integration etc.
Tweetvisor is a horribly cluttered but very powerful Twitter interface or web based Twitter client

CRM/Social CRM/TRM (Twitter Relationship Management)
In case you are serious about business you most probably use some kind of CRM tools for customer relationship management. Both CRM software makers and new kids on the block attempt to harness Twitter conversations to get more leads and organize a better customer service. CRM solutions supporting Twitter are still rare though. At least one, Axopt already disappeared.

CureCRM – Twitter and Email bases CRM
Salesforce Service Cloud supports Twitter
IGOpeople Twitter CRM business suite
Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a Twitter “accelerator” integration

Twitter Directories
One of the most common questions people new to Twitter ask is: Who to follow on Twitter? In order to some quick overview of who might be the right person to follow in your industry or niche you should check out Twitter directories like Twellow.

Twellow – Twitter “Yellow Pages”, one of the oldest and most reputable Twitter user directories
JustTweetIt is a clean and web directory with many users, some of which I recognize. The top result for SEO, Dev Basu is a well known local SEO expert.
Geofollow – Location based Twitter directory covering the whole planet
Twibes is not really a directory it’s rather a collection of Twitter groups based on interests

Twitter Enhancements
Twitter has only ver basic features, even Twitter clients offer only a few more. there are literally thousands of tools that enhance Twitter in one way or another. here I can mention only some notable among them that are ideyll suited for busines people.

TwitterLocal allows you to address local audiences via Twitter, ideal for small businesses
Social Oomph (formerly Tweet Later) is a tool with multiple features, some of clients some of extra tools, scheduling and automating tweets are just two of them
Twaitter is like Social Oomph but with less features which doesn’t mean it’s less useful
PingFM allows to submit links to Twitter, Facebook and numerous other services at once
PeopleBrowsr is a very powerful suite of tools for creating and addressing groups and beyond

Twitter Search and Monitoring Tools
Twitter users produce huge amounts of data you impossibly can be digest or overview as a human being. Even your followers tweets are too much in most cases. search and monitoring tools make sure that you don’t miss something important.

Topsy finds and sorts most of your brand’s mentions, tweets and links
Yahoo Sideline is a Adobe Air based desktop search tool for Twitter. It also displays current trends
Twilert – Like Google Alerts for Twitter mentions, catches most of them
TweetBeep – Similar to Twilert but less reliable. Good to find additional mentions Twilert overlooks but not enough on it’s own
Radian6 – This is an advanced social media analytics suite with some Twitter tools also useful for CRM
Twitturly – shows the most popular Twitter links in a social news like interface
Tweetreach – Find out who really is your friend, or at least who spread your message the most

Blog Tools
Being on Twitter is good for business but integrating it into your website or rather blog is even better. Many tools attempt to do that but only a few of them are good enough for business users.

Twittercounter – A Feedburner like counter showing you the number of Twitter followers, SEOptimise uses one
BackType Plugins allow you a seamless Twitter integration into your blog
Twitter Tools by Alex King allows almost complete Twitter integration into your WordPress blog

You may also want to check out some of these resources for more Twitter business tools:

Cervical cancer, vaccines and social SEO

Stuart Tofts — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:52:51 +0000

The press coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been unpleasant to watch and brought back memories of the MMR vaccine hysteria.

Although the press may regret the damage they have (once again) done, the Google results could remain filled with flawed information for a long time because of this.

Some of the dangerous articles have been exceptionally popular and, of course, those people who believe in a big pharma conspiracy have been linking to them and driving them up in the search engine results pages.

Well, one SEO professional has had a pretty good idea. Writing for Econsultancy (an industry source Kevin often writes for), Malcolm Coles suggests we try to boost the NHS’s ranking by linking to it within posts like this.

I don’t know if a few SEO bloggers can make enough of a difference and I urge the NHS to review its optimisation efforts. However, if linking to official pages using phrases like cervical cancer immunisation has a chance of helping, then I’m happy to try.

Do take Malcom’s suggestions on board and link to these pages using relevant phrases, as I have done here.

Let’s not see another wave of youngsters missing out on an important preventative treatment.