As the lines of SEO and Social Media continue to be blurred, it's becoming very clear that getting a page to rank highly in the search engines takes a combination of the two disciplines. So what does the Social Media marketer need to know about SEO in order to make their social campaigns help with search rankings? This post gives those marketers who focus more on Social Media and less on SEO a checklist of ways to optimize for search before (and after) promoting content on the social sites.
Normally in the SEO world, links are like money in that the larger the bill (more authority), the more powerful it is. So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn't have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it's time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.
Obviously every organization is different, but many times the person running the Twitter and Facebook accounts, is likely a marketer, but not always an SEO. This checklist will guide the Social Media Marketer in your organization with some SEO tips and best practices to keep in mind as they start their next social campaign (or even they're just pushing your latest blog post). [Plus I've listed lots of great links for additional reading. Learning FTW]
Do Keyword Research
Any SEO will tell you that keyword research is always one of the first steps when optimizing a site for search. Well, it's no different in Social Media. Since your social campaign can now help influence the search engines it's just as important to do your keyword research before getting started in the social world.
The best place to start is with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can start by inputting a couple keywords you think searchers will be looking for to find your content. Then the tool will show you estimated (e.s.t.i.m.a.t.e.d.) monthly traffic numbers for those keywords plus others that it thinks are similar.
Now this may be something that you want to work with your SEO on but do a little research on the topic at hand and see which keywords really make the most sense to use. One thing to keep in mind is that you don't necessarily only want keywords with the highest traffic volume, you want to find keywords based on their difficulty for your site to rank for them.
The keywords you choose will come into play as you craft your tweets and Facebook updates, plus when you look at the Title tag and meta description (discussed more below). We ran a test to determine which would get a page to rank faster, lots of tweets, or lots of direct inbound links to a page. As of right now (about a month later) the Tweeted version ranks #1 for "ending hunger sierra leone" while the regular linked to version is lost in the shuffle. Although we still have more analysis to do, and more tests to run, this is a pretty big indication that tweets can influence rankings (possibly) more than links!
Additional Reading:
- The Beginner's Guide to SEO - Chapter 5: Keyword Research from Rand Fishkin
- Choosing the Right Keyphrases from Sam Crocker
- Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy from Laura Lippay
Set Up Social Segments for Tracking
Whee! This is a fun one... ok it's fun if you're a big ol' data geek (which I'm assuming most of you are). Before you even get started on your campaign it's important to have your tracking all set up. You probably already have a specific way you're tracking URLs (more on that below) but what about setting up an easy way to see all "Social" traffic at one time.
Check out this post from Rand about how to Segment Social Traffic in Google Analytics it will walk you through the steps of setting this up.
The image above is looking at our new Team page and looks at Social traffic vs. all other kinds of traffic. It's interesting to see that the spike in traffic happened about the same days for social media and other channels. Just think of the possibilities of having this set up for your campaigns!
Remember, URL Shorteners Matter
When determining which URL shortener to use remember that you want a shortener that will do a 301 redirect from the short URL to yours. That way you can keep as much of that link juice flowing to your own site as possible. Also, be sure to use one that gives you some analytics about clicks and such, like bit.ly.
We use a personalized shortener seomz.me through the bitly.pro service, which is essentially like using bit.ly but with our own shortened domain. It's great we can get data about how many clicks a certain URL gets, what part of the world the clickers are from and the time of day links are clicked. This shouldn't make up for your regular tracking but it's an additional way to see how well your campaign is doing.
Additional Reading:
- URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? from Danny Sullivan
Make Sure Content is Easily Linkable
As a master in getting your content shared on the social networks, have you also thought about ways to build direct links to your content as well? I know for me personally, we saw a spike in social sharing once we (finally) added sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon. But what about adding widgets and embeds to help build links to your page/site.
Some content is easy to share in this manner such as infographics, graphs, etc. Take a look at what OkCupid does on their blog. When you reach the bottom of the page, you get this hover over that not only allows you to easily share the content on the social networks, but it gives you an easy way to copy and paste the link.
When you're working on quick and easy ways to make sure your content is shareable within the social networks, also think about how to build links to the page the traditional way. Your SEO will thank you. :)
Canonicalize The Page (what the what?)
Yea this is a big ugly word SEOs use to make sure that the search engines only see one URL for a specific page. For social sharing this is something to think about when you're setting up the tracking for your social shares. Whether you use Google Analytics tracking, or get tweets from an RSS feed, you're going to have URL tracking variables appended to the URL.
Example:
Let's say I plan on doing a Twitter campaign around the 2010 Industry Survey. The direct URL looks like this:
https://moz.com/industry-survey
But the tracking URL that I actually want people to use so I can track it better in Google Analytics is this:
https://moz.com/industry-survey?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=industry-survey
While the search engines are getting better at deciphering all this, you definitely want to make sure that they can figure out which page is the real or "canonical" page. There are a few ways to do this:
Rel=Canonical Tag
Using the rel=canonical tag you'd point this at the URL without the tracking coded added to the end. Using the example above, if your tagged URL is:
https://moz.com/seo-industry-survey?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=industry-survey
Then the rel=canonical looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://moz.com/seo-industry-survey" />
301 Redirect
Many SEOs will claim that this is the "proper" way to do it, and most likely is. Unfortunately it's not always the easiest to implement especially if you're in charge of Social Media and don't have quick access to the dev team.
Additional Reading:
- 301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use? from Paddy Moogan
- Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps from Rand Fishkin
- Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not) from Lindsay Wassell
- Canonicalization
Check Page Load Time
Can your site handle the load if the campaign goes viral? Obviously you're going to make sure that the site won't buckle under the pressure of all the awesome social traffic you're sending it's way, but what if it slows it down? You could have an infographic that takes a long time to load, or unnecessary JavaScript slowing you down.
Last year Google announced that they're now using speed as a ranking factor (although a small one). Since it does come in to play though, and speeds can be affected if the traffic spikes, it's smart to be thinking about this. Whenever possible, work with your dev team to load test the page or entire site before launching a new campaign.
Title Tag - Use Those Keywords!
Remember earlier in the checklist you did a little research to see which keywords would be most beneficial to use? Now it's time to put them into play! It's too easy to use fancy shmancy titles in your social content because it's a bit catchier than a typical "optimized" title. But there are a few things to remember:
- The Title tag is thought to be the highest on-page ranking factor and having your keywords toward the beginning of the title is best.
- If your social efforts can help get a page ranking in Google, that title tag is going to show up in the results and
- Title Tag Best Practices
- Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing from Danny Sullivan
- Do Keywords in Post Titles Really Matter? from Brian Clark (an oldie but goodie)
Meta Description
The meta description isn't going to help with getting a page's rankings but in the social world it's often times the text that is automatically pulled into a social site. The best example is Facebook. When you add a link to your Facebook wall, it automatically pulls the title tag, meta description and let's you choose an image. Think of the meta description as a way to entice users to click on your link whether the user is searching on Google or checking out a page you shared on Facebook.
Additional Reading:
Measure & Improve
Yes! This is the best step actually. Determine how well your tweets are doing, then improve on them. As SEOs we're constantly talking about increasing our click-through-rate in the search results and on our pages. But what about the click-through-rate of our tweets? I highly recommend reading through Rand's post on Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Click-through-Rate to give you lots of ideas on how to make improvements.
Whew! That's a lot to think about. Some of this you may already be doing, but if you're not, I encourage you to give these a try. See how you can not only improve your social media sharing, but your search engine rankings! Also, don't forget to work closely with your SEO to teach them the world of Social as well. :)
Wow Jen! This is a post that is going to stand out in your list of most thumbed up ones of 2011.
Essential, practical and very actionable... may I thumb it twice?
Ok... let me go tweet it and rank first.
Bit of an aside, but another advantage of a shortener like Bit.ly Pro is that SEOmoz owns seomz.me. If anything happens to Bit.ly (they go under, get bought out, or start 302'ing), you can always bring it in house or switch to another service, without losing those old links and mentions. I guarantee we're going to see people with 100s of shortened links suddenly scrambling when one of the big shortening sites goes under (and one of them will, eventually).
You're right! That is why I've itseo.org as shortener domain. More over, on Bit.ly (respect other tools), this option is for free.
Wow, what a great relevant point. LIKE IT! thanks!
Jennita! I love it!
The really funny thing is that you wrote this a little more like an SEO than a Social Media person, which is ok. For a different perspective, I begged for 8 months to get tweet buttons and like buttons added to our site. The continued response I got was "doesn't impact SERPs, not worth time."
Google/Bing confirm they look at social signals, KABLAM! I've got my Tweet buttons and Like buttons everywhere!
We're an online retailer, and you may wonder "Well, how likely are people to 'like' a product or tweet it out?" The answer is: Way more than you think. I know Google isn't indexing likes yet, but one of the search engines (Bing) will, and I still believe Google will find a way down the line. I don't want to wait until someone from Google comes out and admits it, because that means I am late to the party!
Definitely a good article for starting out. There are some serious, real opportunities here SEOs, and if you are still ignoring social or just thinking of it in terms of dofollow/nofollow, you're going to fall behind.
yeah, I think this is the point I was trying to make above...although I'm an SEO not a social media expert, so you said it better than I could have.
Haha I'm glad you finally got your buttons no matter how slowly it happened. :)
You're definitely right that I wrote this with the mindset of an SEO. I did that as I felt this post needed to come from the SEO in me and not the Community Manager in me. As I put the list together and thought about the examples, I went at it as if I were an SEO explaining it to my Social Media counterpart.
Honestly we didn't have sharing buttons on the blog until the redesign late last year, so I can feel your pain there. :)
Good post.I have been using that link box (similar to ok cupid) on my blog for ages. It is a good way to get back links with the desired anchor text. There are several wordpress plugins like 'seo ultimate' which provide this functionalty. I have gone even one step further and provide link boxes wherever i can even in e-mails, newsletters, infographics etc. If you make your contents easily embeddable, the probability of getting links with the desired anchor text increases by many folds. In this old linkboard friday Rand gave some excellent tips on link building with embeddable contents. I also put sharing buttons in newsletters and RSS feeds and always remind readers to share or link out at the end of the post. I think understanding the science of re-tweets and Science of Facebook Marketing is important for a social media marketer to get optimium results from his social media marketing campaigns. Your marketing campaign performance depends a lot on the day and time you choose to execute it.
Advice I cannot stress highly enough - add your daily marketing to you Google analytics graph annotations. This tracking stops you making bad conclusions from your data when you look back at it.
Add as much as you like, you can star the important ones as a filter. I also find this pretty handy for linkbuilding
Nice to read about new ways of assessing social media efforts - thanks :-)
Nice Jen! This is a stellar and pragmatic resource. Great point on the relevance vs non-relevance of the Meta Description and the blurring of the line between SEO and Social.
An Excellent post. Not only because its accurate regarding its solid SEO tactics, but now I can forward this link to my non technical clients who need to better understand the many moving parts involved in properly structuring a WP blog post or any on-page off-page optimized content. The only other thing I might add to this entry, is the value realized by using an "anchor text" coded comment so as to obtain the link juice for the targeted keywords in your niche market, whcich is probably why one of my more viewed YT videos is on how and why an anchor text coded comment is a sound technique and proactice to routinely use. Strong Work!
That's very insightful. Btw, while doing research, google becomes double generous with its keyword ideas if you're logged in to your adwords account :)
Nice tip about being logged in to get more out of the keyword tool
True! But the person in charge of social media may not have an adwords account.
This is a really useful article for social media marketers, and for all digital marketing professionals who don't specialise in SEO. As far as I am concerned, this is the year that being an SEO is defunct. By which I mean the various threads of online marketing will have merged to such a point that no one should be claiming SEO is a service that can be provided in total isolation, it's time to embrace becoming more and more integrated into overall marketing strategies.
However, there is one point I really much take issue with. Right at the start you say: "it's becoming very clear that getting a page to rank highly in the search engines takes a combination of the two disciplines." I think, that once again, an SEOmoz blog post has succumbed to hyperbole. Social media signals have been officially recognised by Google (i.e. by Matt Cutts in a Webmaster Video) as a ranking signal. However, they are but one signal of over 200 so I hardly think that in all cases you must employ social media to rank for a particular phrase. For faster moving terms, I would agree more so, but that doesn't cover every scenario. I understand your sentiment, and from my opening paragraph I clearly do not fundamentally disagree with the way things are going, but I think you just need rein it in just a bit. It might imply to a novice it's "do or die" in all cases for all search terms on all sites which I really see no compelling evidence offered for. I will read your "ending hunger in sierra leone" test results with interest, but this will only prove what works in the short term at the moment. Social media is a transient medium, and as such I predict that applied as a ranking factor, it is logical to assume that the positive effects would be so too.
I hope you (and more to the point readers) can accept what is intended as polite, constructive criticism because I still believe this to be a very valuable post.
"By which I mean the various threads of online marketing will have merged to such a point that no one should be claiming SEO is a service that can be provided in total isolation, it's time to embrace becoming more and more integrated into overall marketing strategies."
This should be the theme for 2011.
I agree 100% actually. I struggled with that line when I wrote it. I was trying to make the point that now it's time not only for SEOs to think about Social media but vice versa. I appreciate you calling that out and asking about it. I definitely could have phrased that differently so it more made the point I was trying to make. :)
Great checklist, it would also be great to have an audit checklist for existing campaigns
Great idea!
Excellent article Jennita. A perfect guide to sync. SEO and social media.
No doubt the social link graph will surely boost the SEO and the links being retweeted and shared prove their popularity. (Just like the PageRank Logic)
But the links being tweeted and shared from the same social media accounts repeatedly according to me will have gradually lesser value than the ones shared and retweeted from varied and authority accounts.
Hence, the way the tweet or post is worded is also very important as it can draw attention of people who do not know you on social media and help you establish an identity as widening your outreach is also a SMM parameter, which in the long run shall add value to the social link graph and thereby SEO.
I agree! It's like wanting to get good quality, high authority backlinks over just a lof of junky backlinks. I've gotten a lot of great feedback and think there are a few more posts coming to take this info to the next step. This is definitely one of them! How to get others to retweet you, and especially people with high "Social Rank" or whatever we're calling it. :)
Nice info,
For more reading on Title tags I think the post from Danny Sullivan - Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing is outstanding which should be an additional reading.
Thanks.
That's an excellent post! I'm going to add it to the additional reading list above. [Also, I updated the link to go to the right page ;)]
Hi Jennita,
Thanks for sharing this great informative article which will definitely help in making an SEO campaign more successful
A smashing post Jen! I agree with Gianluca. This is destined to be one of your more thumbed up ones.
I learned something brand new too. I had no idea about the URL shorteners and 301's. So a double thumbs up for that bit o' info!
PS - Happy Anniversary!
Dittos on the Happy Anniversary!
Actually, you made me rethink the use of vs. using a 301 redirect to address the campaign variable issues.
This is a keeper and one for sharing over and over.
Thanks Dana! Although sadly this isn't my anniversary. Well I guess it sort of is close to my one year in Seattle! :)
Some really good points. Especially if SEO companies are going to offer social media packages. It is helpful for SEO's to know a bit about social media optimisation in case it is necessary to use a combination depending on what works best for the clients business.
Hi jennita
Your post is really superb. Be a SMM professional I always suggest Page Title is the most crutial thing to get better result in SMM.
We've been looking into this for a while now at Epiphany (however don't yet have a full data set to publish). While we have seen a great corrolation with Tweets bolstering rankings, Facebook not so much. Also it doesn't seem to be just a case of generate millions of tweets and all will be good. There appears to be factors involved such as the number of followers a person has that tweets your link, the frequency of their tweets, the number of links included within their tweets etc etc. Or in other words, quality tweets over quantity.
So, you're kind of saying that you believe there's a correlation between how much a tweet weighs and the klout of the tweeter? Interesting point. I think that makes a lot of sense to consider. Thanks.
Hey hzBelle,
Yeah that's right. It would be a common sense move if you think about it, as it will avoid underhanded link boosting such as via a TwitterBot for example.
So a brand new Twitter account tweeting a link 10,000 times will have nowhere near the impact that would be seen if @mashable tweeted it just the once.
Its an on-going theory...!
Fascinating stuff. It would be interesting to revisit the twitter/link test you mention towards the beginning of the article, to see long term which Sierra Lione page ranks top? Personally I'd guess that it would be the linked to page asthe frequency of tweets dies down and the links get crawled and interpreted.
If this were the case it may be that when we link building takes place in 2 stages in the future. Social link building to get the intial hit and 'regular' link building for the longevity.
Most definitely and we'll be posting again with more information on the data from the test we ran.
I am going to share this with my peeps in journalism, PR and marketing who are just beginning to learn about SEO and social media. Thanks for saving me a lot of breath, Jen! You summarized in a five-minute read what it would take me an hour to explain.
On your canonical v 301 for URLs containing tracking code, you can't use 301s as they will stop the page with the tracking from being loaded and triggering the event.
I use canonical tags but can see Google Web Master Tools showing URLs with my tracking code. So I don't think that fully works either!
I agree, making a 301 you lose the parameters.
Hope
...sorry, I pressed the "add coment" too fast...
I meant to say "Hope I'm saying it right since english is not my mother tongue"
Nevertheless, your post was brilliant and I might be wrong ;)
Hi, I work as a SEO/Social Media Senior Specialist. Whilst this post has some good information I think a few key areas are missing. For example you can have customized meta data for Facebook like buttons, they are more effective then using the standard page title as you can have something that is catered specficially for Facebook. Also keyword research using Google? That is not very social I would mix it up a but and use social media monitoring to assist keyword research mix the data up from that with Google Research. Sure good social Media monitoring usch as Radian 6 is not cheap but it can assist SEO research.
Brilliant! I didn't think of it, but you are so on point. Why use Google's keyword tool when you can instead use the Facebook ad creation tool and find out how many people like something within your demographics? And also get suggestions for other likes?
Maybe use both, but remember - you are trying to get tweets, shares, and likes. Not necessarily just finding things with high search volume/low competition.
Yes it is a decent idea to use both methods when conducting research. Because ideally SEO is highly involved with Research, keyword research is one of the biggest areas you can not just limit yourself to pumping keywords into GA keyword tool, you really need to dive into the data from various tools.
That's a great idea! I definitely took the approach to this post using an SEO's mindset and if the point is to rank in the search engines then doing keyword research in Google makes sense. I love the idea of adding to it by using your social tools. Every Social Media manager or Community Manager has their set of tools that they use to track brand mentions and other things, this is a great way to combine the two.
Thanks Jennita,
Today i have a meeting about the influence of social media for SEO and this post is so helpfull. I will try to make some sort of dutch checklist for it so we can implement it in our organisation.
These posts are the reason why i love to be a part of the SEOmoz community.
Wow, my husband and I were so impressed with your article. We just stumbled upon this site yesterday. So I returned today to start trying out some of the tools. Started with the keyword difficulty tool.
Signing up for the free trial changed a positive experience into a negative one.
We have no record of ever giving seomoz any of our email addresses. So we were surprised to get a message from seomoz that indeed, we already have an account. So we click on "forgot password?"
We go to log-in at seomoz with the temp password, only to get the message saying in effect that no such account exists.
After trying a couple of different emails, each time getting the same response ... well, we are giving up. This is too much trouble at the start of what looked like a beautiful relationship.
Wishing you the best!
This is Megan from the SEOmoz Help Team. I'm so sorry about all the login troubles you're running into! I'd be happy to look into this and get it straightened out for you. Can you send a message to [email protected] with the email address that you're trying to login with? Thanks!
Great post. Thank you so much. finally a checklist one can work with!
Great post! It brought back memories of when I was thrown into managing the Social Media accounts for a local compnay years ago, when I really knew nothing about it. This would have been VERY useful then!
Im very late to comment on this but I loved this article and its very helpful since, we just started doing SEO by our own.
Thanks for your efforts in teaching people like me :)
Great article. Looking for more recent info on the impact of Social Media on rankings...
It's great that a lot of these issues are fixed now in 2015. While the ranking factors might vary a bit social media marketing is still a great tool for SEO.
This post provides information essential for beginners but i enjoyed reading this articles and learned some important tips. Well time to implement.
"...you get this hover over that not only allows you to easily share the content on the social networks, but it gives you an easy way to copy and paste the link." Great point, being able to copy and paste saves time for a lot of visitors. They may want to share it over different mediums.
Over all Jennita, your info is useful to novice and experienced website owners and bloggers alike. The one thing I would add to this piece is that on-page optimization requires a little more than meta title | keyword and link building is not going away any time soon. That said, building a robust web 2.0 link wheel, comprised of sites where you've verified your audience congregates, collaborates and shares info, events, snippets etc. is well worth the effort.
I posted up a PPT Preso on SlideShare this week entitled: How to Build a Web 2.0 Link Wheel that got north of 3,200 views, downloaded 100+ times embedded 99 times and all this action happend in less than 1 week, so I suspect more and more people are paying attention to the convergence of social media and conventional seo.
It's a myth that META descriptions do not help search rankings - they do.
Well crafted META descriptions which help to echo the page keyword relevancies with alternative synonyms can yield a more diverse selection of rankings.
Excellent article and I couldn’t agree more, SEO and social media should go hand in hand when promoting your website and content. It’s like all marketing, there is never a single factor that delivers, it’s a combination of a variety of well planned and executed tactics.
I was looking for a bit of guidance with our social marketing strategy! Excellent articles with common sense actionable advice!
Thank you
This was a great summary of useful SEO techniques. I found it really helpful - thank you!
4 thumbs up! Including my toe thumbs! :D
oh no...I have to thumb this one down. To me it's not so much of a "social media marketer's guide to SEO" as it is a very entry level guide to seo with one or maybe two points targeted at social media marketers. I hope I don't get thumbed down for disagreeing as it seems everyone is on the thumbs up bandwagon here.
But I agree with PaulMartin above and like what he's looking at with social media and how it affects SERPs. Surely SEOmoz has some tests or data that might help someone like him understand better how social media affects SEO. Have you guys noticed that the "trust" factors of the people tweeting your links has a greater effect on rankings? If so, how does a social media marketer best target those folks...the "tweeterati" if you will! Perhaps a post similar to this one to help identify who those people are would be great.
Jennita I love your posts and hope you don't get mad at me for thumbing this one down! But I guess I'll take my lumps when people start thumbing down my comment. And I was soooo close to getting 100 mozPoints!
Hehehe... I think you risk to have thumbs down more for your long disclaimer than for what you say, as you say it politely and giving reasons to your statement ;). Or at least that was what happened to me in the past.
About the content of the post, I think it was written especially thinking to all the people who are Community Managers and started to be asked to think at the SEO consequences of their job; that is why - imo - this post has a "light SEO weight" (even though is always good to refresh the basics).
Yes you are probably right about my disclaimers! sorry.
To the point of sounding redondant, let me refer you to this passage of the post. I am not sure if you overlook the spirit within which it is written.
"So what does the Social Media marketer need to know about SEO in order to make their social campaigns help with search rankings? This post gives those marketers who focus more on Social Media and less on SEO a checklist of ways to optimize for search before (and after) promoting content on the social sites."
Thanks Eryck that's the exact line I was going to show as well. :)
Wow cnoble, heartlessly thumbing Jen down on her one year anniversary at the moz? Say it ain't so!...just kidding pal. I gave you a thumbs up for being so brave.
I agree with G. though. I think it really is exactly what the title says. An SEO checklist for marketers.
One year anniversary at moz??? I've been here almost 2 years GNC :P although I am coming up on my one year in Seattle. ;)
Oh snap! All I saw was your tweet mentioning a one year anniversary and I knew you and Rudy were longer than that and I went off all half cocked! For the record, I thoughtit was longer than that that you were at the moz. Now you can see why I'm not a journalist. Never check my facts!
Don't worry about me getting mad about a thumb down or two... it comes with the territory. However I do think you've missed the point of this post. The audience for this post as I mentioned a few times is for the person who manages social media who doesn't know much about SEO. So in this instance, yes, the post is about beginner's SEO and things that someone who doesn't always think about SEO, should be thinking about.
I think it's a great idea to talk about how to find the social "linkerati" and I may just make that my next post! Also I understand why you, as an experienced SEO, may not like this post. But I hope you can see and understand that this post isn't aimed toward you. :)
geez I love this community! I read and re-read that post to try and see from the context of a social media marketer if there were even any action items. I guess I'm assuming that a social media marketer is (generally speaking) NOT going to have any say or influence on things like URL Canonicalization, page load times, and meta-descriptions. There are a few action items for social media marketers though, like be sure the page is share-able and use url shorteners that utilize 301 redirects.
I am a big advocate of the "show yourselves down thumbers" idea, so anytime I thumb something down I always try to explain what I was thinking.
You have a point, but I think that if social media marketers take the time to learn about things like URL Canonicalization, page load times, meta descriptions, etc., they can have more of an influence on them...which can benefit everyone, or at least get straight SEOs considering the social end more, which generally tends to benefit everyone.
You bring up a point why this post is so valuable, Social Media & Community Managers should understand the ramifications of their campaigns. Marketing should be working closely with IT to ensure canonicalization issues are addressed.
Great information to pass along to our Social Marketing Team. These are things I speak to them daily about, so it is nice to see it all laid out from a source other then me. (Now let's see if they pay attention or even follow directions.)
Wonderful resource!! Great post!
Thanks for this. Some great reminders and great resources. Extremely helpful as I try to explain this stuff to my clients. This would make a good whitepaper (hint hint hint)
Titles tags, point 2. "... results and" and what?
Good piece though
There's some fantastic points here for everyone to bookmark and keep referring to from time to time, great work,
Definatly a post I'm going to bookmark. An insightful checklist into the steps for optimising for Social Media.
Excellent post. I think social media will continue to play a big role in SEO in the future.
You made some awesome points Jen! I think there's so much you can do for SEO using social media. I especially love your point you made about ranking thanks to tweets and shares. I think search engines feel like if people are sharing it on social media, it has to be important. Those may be nofollow links but repetition helps!
WOW Tweets for pagerank?? Look out twitter, hope your servers are ready. Should we have let that cat out of the bag?
Solid content! I like how you broke it down. THX!
Great post. Interesting, easy and informative ;) Great done ;) Must to spread to some friends
interesting, learning about the Twitter test.
This is such a fantastic resource! Thank you very much for it!
Great Article but I believe there will be few other things needs to be included here. Was looking for a guide line to which social media is playing vital role and how it impacts SEO discussed.
Nice post Jen. I have found Title & Description of the content an important factor in social media marketing making minor changes in them can give you some good results.
One more point I would like to add to this checklist is which I think important is the time of sharing the content & keeping various timezone in mind if your share your content multiple time then there is no harm & it will reach large number of people as well.
Fantasic post - super informative and such a relevant topic! I think you're totally right that the lines are blurring between SEO and Social Media; so much so in fact that I think if social media continues to evolve at the rate it has done, SEO and Social Media will become inter-dependant and SEO's will need to become experts in Social Media as well. I can foresee that the SEO who doesn't have totally current knowledge of Social is going to struggle to compete against an algorithm that is increasingly adapting to the social phenomenon.