Category Archives: SMO

Posts Related to Social Media Optimization (SMO)

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SEO for Your Tweets

Are you on Twitter? Do you run a blog or website? Do you tweet about it?

If you do, this tip will help tweak your tweets in an effort to increase the rank of your site or blog in the search engines based on targeted keywords and phrases. There’s no guarantee as to how much of an effect, if any, this will have. However, my personal tests have returned positive results.

To get the most mileage out of your link tweets utilize text relevant to the link destination. Then, make sure to syndicate your Twitter stream on other networks and platforms.

Related and Relevant

Keyphrase targeting tweets that contain links to your website or blog just makes sense. Twitter and Google are not only indexing tweets with links, but are also analyzing the words and phrases within the tweeted link and destination page on your site or blog.

How to SEO Your Tweets

Step 1. Make sure your targeted keywords/phrases are in the text of the tweet that contain the link. Ideally, you want the text to be relevant to the link.

Step 2. Link to a blog post or web page in a tweet.

Try to keep your URL short. If you need to shorten your URL, use Tweetburner or Bit.ly – which saves the original URL and text on the web and shares data with a number of other published resources.

You can authenticate bit.ly for use with other Twitter applications like Seesmic and TweetDeck. Hootsuite’s URL shortening service and social networking management platform is another viable option.

Step 3. Syndicate your Twitter feed/stream. This can be accomplished with a number of methods; Feedburner, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, RSS embedding, WordPress Plug-Ins, Widgets, social networking profiles and aggregation websites … for starters. Backlinks anyone? 🙂

Remember, Twitter attaches the “nofollow” attribute to the link on your Twitter profile and all tweeted links in your social stream.
Many syndicated links generally DO NOT have “nofollow” attribute tags, hence the elevated potential of increasing link juice to your website or blog.

Following the above 3 steps will increase the likelyhood of your Tweets acquiring backlinks by optimizing and syndicating your link tweets with keyphrases related to the promoted link.

You may or may not see immediate results. I’ve witnessed social backlinks juice immediately, then die-off after about a week only to resurface months later. FYI, there are a lot of variables in this scenario, and keep in mind that backlink accreditation can take time.

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Social SEO 101

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Social Media Marketing and SEO – Friend or Foe?

With all of the hoopla traversing the interwebs of late you’d think SEO is in danger of being replaced by social media marketing… well, think again. The two work best as a team and can provide tremendous benefit when leveraged correctly.

Search Engines are still vastly dominated by results from typical websites, not Twitter and Facebook status updates. When you search Google, the first page of results are referred to as ‘universal search’ results. This means that heavily weighted (optimized) content from websites, blogs and social networks may be included. The key term here is ‘heavily weighted’.

Search engines like Google employ this tactic because they are aggressively attempting to protect the relevancy of their search engine results. Irrelevant search results undermine the overall integrity of the search engine’s ability to find quality content. Honestly, are you really interested in an affiliate marketer’s tweets about a product they are promoting (for a commission), or would you prefer results that contain listings for actual products?

It is important to note that social content presented within Google universal search results does not usually rank high for a long period of time, like website content. To circumvent this, Google allows users to further refine their results by clicking on the left-column menu to show sortable results from various social sources. In a nutshell, potential visitors have to dig to find most social content, whereas traditional website content is easily accessible.

If a page 1, position 1 listing in Google for a given keyphrase receives approximately 40% of clicks originating from search – imagine how many less clicks content receives that requires ‘diggin’.

This doesn’t mean Social Media Optimization (SMO) isn’t important! It just means that certain principles of SEO need be applied to socially produced content.

Posted by Josh Laughtland, Founder and Consultant for Boise SEO and Internet Marketing Company Jtree.net