SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)
Chapter 7. Social Media
Let’s go back to my analogy in the early chapters where everything you do adds to the imaginary points value that Google and other major search engines use to assess your rankings. The more you make your website interactive, the longer people will stay. The general thinking is, the more social media elements you add, the more often visitors will visit and find your website relevant to its subject matter.
Search engines believe those rules mentioned in the last paragraph, so you should make social media play a big role in your website’s optimization. If you are a novice you might be asking right now, “what are social media elements?” When you understand what social media elements are, it’s not a long leap from there to social-media optimization.
Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. A better definition might be that social media elements are works of user-created video, audio, text or other multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, wiki, or video hosting website. Well known sites that engage in social media are Google Plus, BlogSpot, Pinterest, Houzz, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You shouldn't discount the need to engage review websites which also act as product and services directories like Angieslist.com, Yelp, City Search, or Customer Lobby.
Creating your own social media elements such as blogs on your website or participating in other social media websites is what brings traffic to your website and adds to your websites content. One of the best things about social media is that in general most elements are free in terms of monetary investment. There is, for the most part, no cost to participate in these networks except for your investment of time, which depending on how involved you get could become substantial.
When correctly tapped into social media, marketing spreads like a virus. This is why it is sometimes called viral marketing. Viral marketing is a not a bad thing. When you participate in social-media, you can almost guarantee that your marketing will soon have that viral quality you’re seeking.
Unfortunately, social-media optimization is not as simple as going to a website and signing up or starting a one paragraph blog and waiting for people to come to your website. For the most part, they won’t.
Approaching social media in that manner will waste your time, and by the time you figure it out the bad reputation you may leave behind may haunt your website or domain name. Managing your reputation on the web is called reputation management in SEO circles and I could write another book just on this topic. I have hundreds of stories on what to look out for and stories of companies ruined on the web because of social media.
The basics to keep yourself from having a bad reputation in social networking is this: when you provide input using social media methods, make sure you do the following:
1. Provide only relative content and no exaggerated claims.
2. Add positive comments and don’t make it appear as though you are trying to outdo someone else or are advertising your services. People don’t forget when a faker tries to jump in their midst for purely marketing purposes. You are marketing but this is social networking. You are making friends.
3. If you are an expert, make sure your claims are accurate. There are real experts on every subject who will point out your flaws with actual data.
4. Don’t ignore people’s issues with your product or service. Address them immediately or you are inviting everyone who has ever had a small issue with your product or service to add their two cents.
5. Don’t bad mouth a competitor. You're only inviting a tidal wave of retribution from your competitor and others.
Seems easy enough, right? Social-media optimization is about first joining communities and creating relationships or friends. It’s by going through the process of becoming part of the community and providing relevant and helpful information that your brand will begin to be recognized by other community members. That’s when you can announce that your website has useful information, and your efforts will begin to pay off.
Social Media’s Value
Some sites have obvious value in social media. Websites such as Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are all websites that no one thought would amount to anything when they began, but they each suddenly took off in their own way, becoming some of the most popular sites on the internet.
Internet users like something to do and to be a part of something bigger. They love to be a part of the community, and that includes online communities as well. The generation that has just entered the workforce and those growing up right now are very computer and internet savvy. For the most part, this generation has been a part of those social networking sites during their schooling. These sites have provided everything from evaluations of teachers, classes, entertainment events, self-advertising, keeping up with the latest school rumors, and even schools providing their school event calendars.
When this generation is out of school they become involved in all kinds of activities online, from shopping and downloading music to participating in social networks. The kids are networking socially for different reasons than adults, but both have learned to participate.
Social-Media Strategies
So you have a website and you need to market it. Using social media is different than most marketing techniques you are taught in economics or marketing in college – At least until they stop using 15-year-old text books. Now there are thousands of sites and you can make your own social media components, but the goals are the same. In the end your goals are to:
· Know how to target your audience and deliver the right message: If you approach the wrong audience with the wrong message, you’ll learn a quick lesson in reputation management when the court of opinion attempts to destroy your reputation.
· Create valuable content: Good content is key to social-media marketing. If you make it a point to create fresh, unique content regularly, visitors will come to you because they know they can find the current information they need. If you’re afraid of giving away all your eggs except on a one on one sales call, you will get your message out very slowly.
· Be a valuable resource, even if it doesn’t help you monetarily: If you try to help without expecting anything in return you gain points and you can gain a good reputation which will, in turn, draw users to your website. Always wearing your salesman hat works in the corporate world, but online it is a death sentence.
· Be a user resource: Internet users, and especially those users who participate in social media and social networking, expect you to provide information that is useful and relevant to them. If you’re not providing accurate and helpful information, they’ll go to someone who is and bad mouth you on the way.
· Help your content spread: One way of advertising your website’s services or products discreetly is to use your trophy and long-tail keywords in your helpful tips and comments on social media sites. Search engines also index this information and when people use search engines to search on those keywords, your blog or other social networking submissions show up. Another good tip is to collect or group your helpful information into other online content such as a PDF, an audio file, or video file which you can provide links for.
· Increase your linkability: You want useful information that other site owners find valuable enough to put a link on their website to yours. The linkability of your site is determined by the amount of content that you have available to users who might come from social networks. Old information that rarely changes will not help, so make sure your content is updated regularly.
· Make bookmarking your site easy: Don’t make users try to figure out how to add your blog or site to their content feed. Post your URL or code for visitors to add you to their important links or their website. Use a tool called RSS Button Maker atUwww.toprankblog.com/tools/rss-buttonsUto create a button.
· Reward helpful users: If you have users that are helpful and/or send business your way, find a way to reward those users so they will continue to be helpful, especially if you made the sale.
· Don’t be afraid to try new things: Use your creativity to do something different as often as possible. In social-media optimization, creativity is rewarded.
Social media marketing is a great tool if used wisely. It can also be a terrible one if you use it wrong. Using the wrong tactics or using them only half way will render your efforts worthless. You can also expect that it will be very hard to rebuild the trust that you destroy on the web.
There are some rules of etiquette to follow that will help you keep out of trouble. Let us take a look at those in the next section.
Social Media Etiquette
As an SEO expert, I find that companies come to me frequently because their web reputation has been injured, many times unintentionally by their own staff and sometimes through no fault of their own.
Let’s take a look at a few rules of etiquette that you should follow to keep yourself from becoming a statistic in the bad category:
1. Spend some time listening to your audience before you join the conversation so you can gain an understanding of the language, the tone, and the expectations of the conversation participants.
2. After you begin to interact with social media elements, use the information that you gather watching and listening on a social networks to ensure that your strategy is targeting the correct people and that the responses to your input are positive.
3. Track your site metrics to see if there are any sudden spikes or dips in your web traffic which could indicate that your involvement is effective or ineffective.
4. Provide only content that adds value to the conversation. If your content doesn’t add anything or is inaccurate, the other participants will either ignore you or begin to destroy you.
5. Use RSS feeds. RSS feeds instantly update those who have chosen to watch your content. This means that your links will spread faster than you could ever imagine.
6. Keep in mind that social media is all about relationships. Both engage in and be willing to encourage participation.
7. Make an individual approach as an expert in your service or product. Approaching as the business or company will automatically create suspicion. They may think you are just there to sell something. If you don’t have the time yourself, consider hiring bloggers or others to handle your company’s social-media participation.
Social Media Outlets
There are many types of social media elements out there in the web world for you to tap into. It is sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 and is definitely the major shift in SEO right now. Web 2.0 is all about the social nature of the internet, and if you don’t tap into that social aspect, the SEO on your site will quickly be out-of-date and ranked very low on every major search engine. Using social-media elements, however, you can get a jump-start on your social-media strategy.
So where do you start? Here are some suggestions on what sites you should visit and incorporate into your website:
· Angies List: www.angieslist.com
· Blogger: www.blogger.com
· Blogspot: www.blogspot.com
· CitySearch: www.citysearch.com
· Customer Lobby: www.customerlobby.com
· Delicious Bookmarks: www.delicious.com
· Digg: www.digg.com
· Google Plus: https://plus.google.com
· HOUZZ: www.houzz.com (For builders & remodelers)
· Instagram: www.instagram.com
· Twitter: www.twitter.com
· Pintrest: www.pintrest.com
· Facebook: www.facebook.com
· LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com
· Merchant Circle: www.merchantcircle.com
· StumbleUpon: www.stumbleupon.com
· Reddit: www.reddit.com
· Yelp: www.yelp.com
· YouTube: www.youtube.com
· Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.com
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These sites each have a different social media element which can be incorporated into your website. But here is a little tip! In SEO circles the saying goes, “The more you do with Google, the more Google will do for you.” It couldn’t be truer in social media either. Why am I telling you this? Well from that list above, Google owns and runs Google+, Blogger.com, Blogspot.com and YouTube.com. It also heavily borrows information from Yelp. So if you’re just starting with social media elements, which do you think will give you the greatest rankings on Google? You’re right, brain scientist, the ones owned by Google.