SEO & Social Media Marketing
To Increase Your Social Media Marketing, Think of the Search Engines as Your Customers
Mar 10th
If you want to improve your on-line presence, and all of us involved with social media marketing do, try thinking of the search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo as your customers. Imagine that each one of your web pages is a treasure chest, and your customers, the search engines, want to know what is inside of it!
Help search engines open the treasure chests within your website by acting upon the following advice:
- All of your web pages need to link to each other. But don’t make visitors or the search engines make more than two clicks to access every page. One click access is even better. Some web designers mistakenly believe that the more complex each web page is, the more visible it will be to the search engines. This is not true. Your online visitors and Google want their experience on your website to be as simple “flat” as possible. Social media marketing is all about helping others in any way possible. Search engines know how frustrating it is for customers if they have to go through four or five layers to get to where they want to go – and they judge your site accordingly. To find out more about this topic, you can review Google’s downloadable Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. However, before you leave, here are a few more recommendations you should heed.
- When possible, keep each web page’s address or URL clean and short – without any weird punctuation marks, equal signs, or underscores. Also, make sure you use detailed, relevant keywords in the address that are pertinent to the information on the page. You will lose ground with your attempts to improve social media marketing and the search engines will dock you if your web page’s address has little to do with the actual content on the page itself.
- Name your website. You might overlook the title bar at the top of each browser window, but search engines don’t! Give each page a keyword-driven, concise, title. If you sell knit beanies, for example, don’t title your page “Keep your head warm.” Instead, title it “Hand Knit Beanies.”
- Be as descriptive as possible for the search engines in the descriptive fields as you are finishing the page and getting ready to publish it. Think about this area as the text in a catalog. In order to improve your social media marketing through smart search engine optimization techniques, you must grab the attention of the reader, and the description must be relevant to its web page.
- Include a h1 heading tag to every article. Without an h1 heading tag on each page of your website, search engine crawlers will have trouble understanding your content just as if you would have trouble reading an article that didn’t have a headline.
On a social media marketing note, if you use other people’s information, like I have for some of this article from Erin Weinger’s article “What you don’t know about SEO” (Thank you very much!), make sure you mention their assistance, and your gratitude for their help. Who knows, you could even get a link back from them, increasing your online presence and optimizing your search engine opportunities.
Your Social Media Marketing Should Include Creating and Distributing Relevant Videos!
Feb 20th
The fact is that search engines are now giving preferential treatment to videos. It is their attempt to provide online shoppers with a better variety of specialized content when searching for our keywords. One company, Forrester Research, reports that compared with standard SEO and social media marketing optimization techniques, a properly submitted (and relevant) video is 50 times more likely to achieve a first-page Google ranking.
In the past, when we searched for a topic, take trust seals, for example, we were provided with relevant articles and news on how they increase a website’s conversion rates. Then came fresh, newly conceived, yet highly related blog posts telling how effective trust seals are at helping websites build high levels of trust with their visitors – turning more of them into valued customers.
After that, the search engines began including pertinent photos about what a trust seal looks like. With the photo, a link would take us right to the business selling the trust seal, making the process clean and convenient.
But photos were given more privileges, in many ways, than most content-driven articles and posts simply because it was different. Search engines were quick to rank relevant photos higher than equally useful content. Few complained as searching become more colorful.
Then YouTube showed up and offered the ability to find out about trust seals by watching a relevant video – much more attention-grabbing and in many cases just as informative as reading an article!
Because of this shift, YouTube is now the second largest search engine, requiring other search engines to modify requirements for reaching the first page in the search to increase the number of videos searchers see when they utilize their services.
Today, search engines are classifying relevant video ahead of photos and most articles and posts, with the intention of making the first page in almost any search topic (including trust seals) an aesthetically pleasing experience for the person searching.
Because of this truth, it is critical that videos become a large part of our social media marketing campaigns. And the quicker we respond to the video tidal wave, the easier it will be to reap the benefits. That’s because, relatively speaking, valuable video is in short supply.
Here are a few things you need to consider when creating a video to increase the SEO value of your daily social media marketing.
First, post quality, relevant video on your website – and place it on the top fold of your home page. This will make the initial contact with online visitors a relaxed, enjoyable, yet informative experience.
Post lots of quality, relevant videos on YouTube and the other dozens of video search engines. But don’t assume that because you have posted there, that you are finished. Submit those videos to other non-video exclusive search engines too, and include the pages that the videos appear on.
Videos are critical today in optimizing social media marketing. But make sure that your video and its pertinent content are properly indexed back to your website rather than to the video platform provider’s website.
In conclusion, the ways that our potential clients are using to find our online products and services are changing. Information about the value of trust seals, for example, is found from articles, posts, pictures, tweets, buzzes, fan pages, and, more and more often, videos.
If we want an easier way for our keywords to enter the hollowed confines of the first page in any search engine, we must include valuable, relevant videos in our social media marketing.
Combining SEO with Social Media Marketing
Dec 30th
Often, what seems so new and cutting-edge, stems from principles learned long, long ago. Such is the case with the latest trend toward combining social media marketing with search engine optimization.
Thousands of years ago we were all hunters and gatherers. The hunters were sly and fearless. They divided and conquered. The gatherers’ stayed together as a close-knit group and, well, gathered.
The hunters all lived together, and the gatherers all lived together. But the hunters did not live with the gatherers. Each thought the other was odd and inferior.
That is until, as many legends attest,
