by Stone Reuning Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website. After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name - it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website , then our Facebook page , our Twitter profile , our reviews on Kudzu , our marketing blog , our LinkedIn profile , and also a press release or article we’ve recently written.  The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using. 1. Grow your following. Tthis seems to hold true for Facebook and Twitter as it does in the general realm of web sites - the more followers you have, the more authority your social media page carries. (Except when it comes to websites, you’re usually evaluating links, not followers, and the exact number can be a little harder to assess.) Of course there are great benefits to having a large number of followers even beyond ranking higher. But did you know that the people you follow may also impact the search engines’ assessment of relevancy? That’s right, there may be benefit to following people in your direct line of business most importantly, as this helps strengthen the signal of what your business is all about. 2. Optimize your profile page’s meta tags and URL. Twitter creates your page title from your username and your name. Your bio becomes the description tag. Kudzu is using our company name and address as the title tag, which is great for local searches. Take note of which parts of your page are comprising the meta data and make sure it’s optimized accordingly. You can also nab your own name as part of your Facebook page URL now, too. (It used to be that you had to have a certain number of fans.) And your Twitter URL includes your username, so choose wisely. 3. Post links to your newly produced content to help it get indexed faster. Though social media sites use the no-follow tags, new content seems to be getting indexed faster when posted to Twitter and other social media sites. One reason may be that it gives an opportunity for your followers to link to it from other sites, like their blogs, for example. Since your Tweets and Facebook updates get exposure for pages you reference faster, your linked content can also gain exposure much faster than previously.   4. Optimize your updates. This will depend on the platform, but especially Twitter can offer opportunity here, since tweets themselves can show in search results. The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end. You may also want to append RT@username at the end of your tweets when retweeting, and keep your tweets to 120 characters or so to avoid truncating. On Facebook, keep your updates related to your company’s line of work as much as possible. This helps build the theme for the page. 5. Build links to your social media profile pages. As with any web page, inbound links matter. Include links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in your site footer or elsewhere so it can be found from every page of your site easily.  In closing, one word of advice. As with your regular online marketing and SEO efforts, the needs of the users take precedence. The above points are tweaks only. Build up the value of your social media accounts by serving your customers and followers well, and the rest will follow. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Optimize Your Social Media Pages for Top Rankings - 5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now

by Stone Reuning Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website. After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name - it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website , then our Facebook page , our Twitter profile , our reviews on Kudzu , our marketing blog , our LinkedIn profile , and also a press release or article we’ve recently written.  The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using. 1. Grow your following. Tthis seems to hold true for Facebook and Twitter as it does in the general realm of web sites - the more followers you have, the more authority your social media page carries. (Except when it comes to websites, you’re usually evaluating links, not followers, and the exact number can be a little harder to assess.) Of course there are great benefits to having a large number of followers even beyond ranking higher. But did you know that the people you follow may also impact the search engines’ assessment of relevancy? That’s right, there may be benefit to following people in your direct line of business most importantly, as this helps strengthen the signal of what your business is all about. 2. Optimize your profile page’s meta tags and URL. Twitter creates your page title from your username and your name. Your bio becomes the description tag. Kudzu is using our company name and address as the title tag, which is great for local searches. Take note of which parts of your page are comprising the meta data and make sure it’s optimized accordingly. You can also nab your own name as part of your Facebook page URL now, too. (It used to be that you had to have a certain number of fans.) And your Twitter URL includes your username, so choose wisely. 3. Post links to your newly produced content to help it get indexed faster. Though social media sites use the no-follow tags, new content seems to be getting indexed faster when posted to Twitter and other social media sites. One reason may be that it gives an opportunity for your followers to link to it from other sites, like their blogs, for example. Since your Tweets and Facebook updates get exposure for pages you reference faster, your linked content can also gain exposure much faster than previously.   4. Optimize your updates. This will depend on the platform, but especially Twitter can offer opportunity here, since tweets themselves can show in search results. The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end. You may also want to append RT@username at the end of your tweets when retweeting, and keep your tweets to 120 characters or so to avoid truncating. On Facebook, keep your updates related to your company’s line of work as much as possible. This helps build the theme for the page. 5. Build links to your social media profile pages. As with any web page, inbound links matter. Include links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in your site footer or elsewhere so it can be found from every page of your site easily.  In closing, one word of advice. As with your regular online marketing and SEO efforts, the needs of the users take precedence. The above points are tweaks only. Build up the value of your social media accounts by serving your customers and followers well, and the rest will follow. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Read more: 
Optimize Your Social Media Pages for Top Rankings - 5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now

Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz . Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference. I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting. Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say. Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps. If you haven’t checked out Buzz, or haven’t checked it out recently, you might want to give Buzz another look . You can follow me on Buzz if you’re interested; we’re having a nice discussion about favorite Chrome extensions right now.

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Give Buzz another look

by Mike Moran Image via Wikipedia I admit it. When Twitter first came out, I didn’t get it. I even wrote a blog post called, ” I’m a Twitter Twit .” But I am not letting the same thing happen with Foursquare . Foursquare isn’t for every business, but if you want people to show up at your location, you ought to check out how Foursquare works. It might work for you. If you didn’t know, Foursquare is a social networking game you play from your phone, allowing you to “check in” to share your current location with others. The simplest form of the game rewards the player who checks in the most time in the last 60 days by naming him the “mayor” of that location. What’s the point? There’s no point, really. It’s just fun. But smart local marketers have already taken advantage of Fourquare. Bars buy free drinks for anyone who becomes the new mayor. Some stores offer a discount for anyone who checks in. Others provide coupons that folks who check in can share with their friends, possibly drawing them to the location, too. Now, some businesses can benefit more than others. I’m not sure that anyone cares about being the mayor of the Mendelsohn Insurance Agency. Somehow, checking in from a bar or a restaurant or a cute boutique seems a lot cooler. And if you sell online or over the phone, checking in ain’t something your customers will do. But if you have a business built on repeat visits to your location, and on word of mouth passed among friends, Foursquare might be just what the doctor ordered. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Foursquare in favor of location-based marketing

This morning we announced a replay feature in real-time search that helps you search the public archive of updates from Twitter. Now, we have more Twitter news from today’s Chirp Conference . We’ve just released a new experimental service in Google Labs called Google Follow Finder to help you expand your Twitter network. With Google Follow Finder , simply enter your Twitter account name and you’ll see a list of people you might be interested in following. You can also get interesting suggestions by entering other Twitter user names. Here’s what it looks like: If you see someone you want to follow, just click “Follow on Twitter,” log in, and they’ll be added to your following list in Twitter. This integration is based on Twitter’s new @anywhere frameworks, which make it easy for any site to add Twitter functionality. We’re using the frameworks to provide dynamic information about Twitter accounts and one-click following. The lists in Google Follow Finder are generated using public following and follower lists on Twitter. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME , we’ll suggest TIME as a “Tweep you might like.” The list of “Tweeps with similar followers” is simply a list of accounts with similar follower lists to yours. We hope you find some sweet tweeps. Posted by Aaron Wise, Associate Product Manager

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Google Follow Finder: Find some sweet tweeps

Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace , Facebook and Buzz , expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010: The chart shows the relative volume of activity on Twitter about the topic. As you can see, there are daily spikes in the afternoon (when parks are the most fun) and an unusually high spike on March 27. Clicking on the 27th, you’ll discover it was a sunny Saturday, which may explain the increased traffic on Twitter. People were tweeting about disc golf and tennis, biking, riding a party bus, craving chips and salsa…the kind of local, time-specific information that up until now would be almost impossible to find online. By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run ? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode. The replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days (if you want to try it now, try out this special link ). For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006. All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that. As for me, after some hard work on real-time search, it’s time for a virtual vacation to relive one of my favorite moments of the Winter Games. Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager for Real-Time Search

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Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive

Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace , Facebook and Buzz , expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010: The chart shows the relative volume of activity on Twitter about the topic. As you can see, there are daily spikes in the afternoon (when parks are the most fun) and an unusually high spike on March 27. Clicking on the 27th, you’ll discover it was a sunny Saturday, which may explain the increased traffic on Twitter. People were tweeting about disc golf and tennis, biking, riding a party bus, craving chips and salsa…the kind of local, time-specific information that up until now would be almost impossible to find online. By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run ? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode. The replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days (if you want to try it now, try out this special link ). For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006. All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that. As for me, after some hard work on real-time search, it’s time for a virtual vacation to relive one of my favorite moments of the Winter Games. Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager for Real-Time Search

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Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive

Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace , Facebook and Buzz , expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010: The chart shows the relative volume of activity on Twitter about the topic. As you can see, there are daily spikes in the afternoon (when parks are the most fun) and an unusually high spike on March 27. Clicking on the 27th, you’ll discover it was a sunny Saturday, which may explain the increased traffic on Twitter. People were tweeting about disc golf and tennis, biking, riding a party bus, craving chips and salsa…the kind of local, time-specific information that up until now would be almost impossible to find online. By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run ? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode. The replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days (if you want to try it now, try out this special link ). For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006. All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that. As for me, after some hard work on real-time search, it’s time for a virtual vacation to relive one of my favorite moments of the Winter Games. Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager for Real-Time Search

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Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive

by Sage Lewis Check out this interesting study by Chadwick Martin Bailey: Consumers Engaged Via Social Media Are More Likely To Buy, Recommend “The study of over 1500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. And an impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of. Considering Facebook’s over 400 million users, the opportunity is great for social media marketers.” Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Chadwick Martin Bailey Study On Social Media and Buying

by Stoney deGeyter They say it can’t be done. I’m told it’s impossible. Ridiculous! Scandalous! In SEO school* we are taught that you can’t optimize a single web page for more than two or maybe three keywords at a time. Many say you can’t truly be effective optimizing for more than one. It just doesn’t work! But what if there was a way that it could work? What if you could successfully optimize a single web page for 15 or more keyword phrases at a time and get rankings for all of them? What would that kind of information be worth to you? Send your paypal donation to ppw@polepositionweb.com and I’ll share this secret. Every Page Has a Core Keyword Each page of your site should have a very particular focus. In most cases that can be summarized in two or three words. These would be your core terms. What’s your page about? The start of the keyword research process is uncovering all the core terms that fit your site and your audience, then mapping each core term to a specific page of your site. For the one-keyword-only enthusiasts… this is your one keyword . Every Core Term has Qualifier Once you’ve got all your core terms established you can now do some more in-depth keyword research to find the qualifiers that go along with each core term. Your qualifiers may be: This is just a fraction of the qualifiers that you can find for any one core term. Your keyword research tool will help you uncover these qualifiers and any other searchable phrases using these core terms. As you put them together you might get phrases such as: Your keyword research tools will tell you the viability of the combinations you create. Or better, let the tools create the combinations so you can see what’s most viable. Not Every Qualifier is a Fit Not all qualifiers work together and can (or should) be optimized on the same page. You want to separate your qualifiers and group them together. All your “software” or “system” related terms can be grouped together, while your “advantages” and “benefits” phrases go together. There are a lot of factors involved and how you ultimately group your keyword core terms and qualifiers and a lot depends on the layout of your site, how many similar core terms you have and how easily different qualifier groups can be optimized on another page. The goal isn’t to throw as many keywords at a page as possible and hope for the best. What you want to do is group your keywords in a way so that every keyword in a single group is a perfect fit for any given page you are optimizing, and a perfect fit with the other keywords in the group. So where do the 15 phrases come in? For any one core term I research I’ll often find anywhere from a dozen to a couple hundred of searched qualifier variations. Many of those are irrelevant to any site I’m working on, but a good number will be relevant and valuable. Plurals and singulars or changing word order will often create more variations that you can add, provided they are legitimately searched phrases. By targeting only a single core term and using a dozen or so tightly grouped qualifiers you create a single page that can be optimized for all those phrases effectively. Done right, your content won’t feel keyword stuffed and you’ll find your page ranking for more than one phrase at a time. *There is really no such thing Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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How to Optimize a Single Web Page For Over 15 Keywords and Get Ranked On All of Them