Posts tagged Profiles
Using Social Media Profiles to Build Up Your SEO
Aaron Wheeler over at SEO Moz recently posted Rand’s whiteboard about using your social media profiles for SEO purposes. We’ve summarized the transcription for you here:
Most people know that social media is extremely valuable for SEO, but even some advanced marketers are at a loss for how to harness the power of this medium. Here five ideas are presented for making the most out of these profiles.
- Direct Links. When my Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account put out a link they point to other sites. Those sites in turn point to other sites and when you follow the chain you realize that there’s some pretty powerful link juice floating around. Making sure these links are followed and actually point back to somewhere is critical unless you’re just counting on people seeing your link and using it, which is unlikely.
- Dominating SERPs. The race to fill up the top spots can be aided by getting social media sites in the mix – they tend to do well in rankings. The key is to fill these profiles up with good information and not create them just for spam’s sake. That never works and a million people out there are doing it. Make sure to participate heavily when you first get your profiles off the ground. Tweet, comment, send out friend requests – anything to get yourself noticed in the search results. Additionally, make sure to get others to link back to your profile…this will also help your rankings. Give out the same bios and same links everytime you contact anyone.
- Brand Context. Make sure that everything you do in terms of your social media profiles positively reflects upon your brand, especially if you’re acting as a representative. More marketing than SEO, branding is the biggest way to drive traffic and get quality links out of social media. Good branding also leads to sales and additional networking opportunities as well.
- Drive Your Links. Remember that everytime you participate in the social media conversation you have the opportunity to direct a link. This means, each reTweet, each Facebook post, each message should have some sort of link purpose in mind. Don’t forget that formatting and link context is very important, so choose the way you form your content carefully. Also remember that each link you put out has the ability to become a secondary link, that is, one that’s posted on an additional, non-social media site as well.
- Social Media as a Content Source. Use social media profiles as a source of content for your own site. If someone posts a YouTube video, repost it and start a conversation around it. If there’s an interesting Twitter conversation going on, take screen shots then turn the whole thing into a blog post. It’s simple, really. Have other people do the heavy lifting and then repurpose their content, siting them, of course.
Follow these steps and see your link count soar…using social media to your advantage is one of the quickest ways to develop a well rounded SEO plan.
Summary written and edited by Heather Hendrick
Link Profiles, Visualized
Everyone uses backlinks, as Tom_C over at SEOmoz recently pointed out, and there are seven great ways to visualize them. Link data is useful for many things like analysis, education, adjustments, and sometimes it’s just plain SEO fun.
Which Folders are Top
OSE’s top pages function is supremely useful as it allows users to see which folders and pages are linked to most often. Users can create their own subset of folders and gain data over which pages are the most popular.
Create a GEOlink Map
Create a map of backlinks that shows where your links are coming from…it’s particularly useful for analyzing competitor data and even creating marketing targets for a campaign.
Neat Tag Clouds
Wouldn’t it be cool to create a tag cloud that was shaped like something else to display your most popular keywords? Well, you can! Create a cloud based on the theme of your website for added visual interest.
Directory Links Visualized
It’s good to look at both the spammy and non-spammy links on a company’s backlink profile, and it’s almost always the case that the better links are more interesting to analyze. An interesting way to weed out any directory links from a competitors profile is to use the formula:
=IF(IFERROR(FIND(“directory”,A2),IFERROR(FIND(“directory”,B2),IFERROR(FIND(“Directory”,B2),0)))>0,”Y”,”N”)
Then create a pie chart from the data. This will tell you what kind of links make up the bulk of your competitors stash and also which of their links is worth copying.
Venn Diagrams
It’s interesting to create a Venn Diagram based on your links as well as those of your competitors. You can easily see which links you have in common and which sites’ backlink profiles are most like your own.
Broken Links?
Most easily accessed through Google’s Webmaster Tools, the Broken Links tool is helpful for figuring out which links need immediate attention. A broken link is a useless link and should either be nixed or fixed.
SEOmoz Labs Tools
These tools are helpful for identifying opportunities with new clients as well as existing ones. It can help congregate existing links, developing links, and link opportunities which are always useful for an SEO hosting company to know.
Google Places Now Allows Custom Links to be Displayed in Profiles
by Dave Cosper
After you click “More details” the link display like this:
Also, I noticed these links display alphabetically, so be aware of the titles/descriptions you use. One of the oddities of this feature is both the text and hyperlink display as identical copy and so far I could not figure out a way around this repetition. For example, if you add “Follow us on Twitter!” in the first field and place the desired URL for this title in the second field, it will display as:
View full post on Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
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