Great social media execution is a powerful new weapon in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that can lead to top search rankings for your company. Today, over 50% of Google searches for major brands turn up user-generated content, blog articles and other social media related content. However, most fail to deliver even close to the desired results.
Of the three pillars of SEO (content, architecture, and links), it’s the “link authority” pillar that’s usually the weakest. If only it weren’t so darned difficult and time-consuming to acquire high quality, relevant links! Yet without such links, you won’t be able to earn the trust, authority and importance required to rank well in search results, and your optimization efforts will fall short.
So, how do you solve this?
To answer that, author and consultant Stephan Spencer shares how to deploy a structured process via social media that can help your company be found – and stand out – in search engine results.
To contact Stephan directly or look at more of his videos, interviews, and articles, check out his website at www.stephanspencer.com
No Cookies No Problem - Steve Krull, Be Found Online
The Social Media Underground
1. The Social Media Underground
Go “Underground” (Ethically) and Earn Buzz,
Links & (Ultimately) SEO Value
Stephan Spencer
SEO author, speaker, consultant
2. First Off... Who Am I?
• Author of Google Power Search &
Co-author of The Art of SEO
• Founder of SEO agency Netconcepts
• Sold Netconcepts to Covario in 2010
• Lived in NZ for 8 yrs, returned to US in 2007
• Invented an SEO technology called GravityStream
• Launching an SEO training/coaching program at
ScienceofSEO.com
3.
4.
5.
6. A Blog is an Asset
My daughter,
blogger & SEO.
$5 - $30 / day
passive income.
Started when she
was 14.
SEO: So simple even a
child can do it!
7. Social Media Optimization
• Every social site has its own unique opportunities,
quirks and anomalies.
• You can think of these as “hacks”
• O’Reilly definition of “hacks”:
– tools, tips, and tricks that help users solve problems
– aimed at intermediate-level power users
7
8. Social Media Powers Your SEO
• Write link bait articles
• Seed your link bait articles into social media. A
“power user” should submit it, as it will get more
traction.
• Examples: 19 Things You Didn’t Know About Death,
Craziest Urinals from Around the World, 100 Best
Beers from Around the World
• More on this: Social Media Underground article on
Search Engine Land, podcast on StephanSpencer.com
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12. Link Baiting
• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or
compilation of news stories
• Post a scoop
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or
prominent blogger’s opinion
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of
your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You
know you’re a when…”
Source: Performancing
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13. Link Baiting
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of
an event you’re blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece
of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that
links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for
bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites,
contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)
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14. So… Get Creative!
• Give awards / recognition
– Badges with link text underneath
• Allow webmasters to republish your articles
– Require a link in your byline
• Publish unique content
– Podcasts (e.g. SteveSpangler.com)
– Screencasts (use Screenflow or Camtasia Studio)
– Wikis (e.g. SEOGlossary.com)
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15. So… Get Creative!
• Run contests
– E.g. Design Shoemoney’s business card, win business cards for life
• Offer useful tools for webmasters, such as…
– Weather stickers
• E.g. Wunderground.com, SuperPages.com
– RSS feeds
• Lottery winning numbers from SuperPages.com
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16.
17.
18.
19. Widgets & Badges
• For folks’ blog sidebars, MySpace profiles, etc.
• Most effective if married up with a meme
– (a meme is a “copy me” instruction
backed up with threats and/or
promises)
• Examples:
– How Many Five Year Olds Could
You Take on in a Fight?
– Which Superhero Are You?
– Swicki
– SeenOn.com Grey’s Anatomy
• Many can be turned into Facebook apps too
21. Social News Sites
• Seed linkbait into social news sites
• News articles, blog posts, photos, etc. identified
by enough “shout outs” by users
– Reddit, Digg, Newsvine, Techmeme, Shoutwire, etc.
– StumbleUpon is a bit different. More like channel-surfing
on your TV
• Votes push the good stuff up to the front page
• Popurls.com is an aggregator of the most popular
stuff from many of these social sites
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22. Reddit & Digg
• Strip away all commercial links during the initial swarm
• Friend popular users. Better yet, get a popular user to submit your
story.
• Time your presence on the front page for daylight hours
• Craft a killer title using this formula from Muhammad Saleem:
number + adjective + key phrase
– E.g. “13 Most Chilling Haunted Hotels” or “16 Incredibly Unconventional
Hotel Rooms”
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23. StumbleUpon
• Force your friends to stumble your stuff using the
“Send to” function in the StumbleUpon toolbar
– They have to view your URL before they can continue
with their random channel surfing
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25. Twitter
• Create a microsite dedicated to Twitter
– E.g. Zappos’ Tweetwall
• Circumvent spam filters and inbox clutter using
direct messages. Can't DM them if they aren't
following you.
• Set a custom background
• Encourage retweets. Retweet count is a more
meaningful metric than followers
25
26. Video & Photo Sharing Sites
• Seed your linkbait into video & photo sharing
sites...
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Pinterest
27. YouTube
• YouTube = the #2 search engine
• With most popular YouTube promotions, YouTube gets the links and the original site
usually does not. Stack the odds more in your favor by adding a URL to your description
(becomes clickable) and/or by creating a microsite and making the microsite URL your
username.
– E.g. “willitblend.com” is BlendTec's username
• Use as many tags as possible while still being accurate
• Have a custom background on your channel page
• Cross-post your video to other video sharing sites simultaneously w/ OneLoad
• Run a contest and recruit popular YouTube users to enter. Their video submission will get
pushed out to all their subscribers
– E.g. Intuit's “Tax Rap” contest
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28. YouTube
• Be creative but unpolished
– Eepybird's Bellagio Fountain of Diet Coke + Mentos
– BlendTec's “Will It Blend?”
– Heroes spoof commercial (“Zeroes”) – an NBC creation
– John Cleese Backup Trauma webisode
– Intuit's “Tax Rap” content
– SolarDave's SMX spoof with cut-out figures as the actors
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33. Flickr
• Always use tags – as many as possible while still being accurate.
Put multiple word tags in surrounded by quotation marks “”
• Make descriptive titles for your photos
• Create thematic Sets for your photos
• External links are nofollowed
• If the photo is location specific, go into Flickr's tools and geotag
the picture
– Go into the Flickr set tools, and locate the location on the Yahoo!
Map, then drag the picture onto the map to pinpoint its location
• Creative Commons license your photo and put how you want
the user to credit you in your photo's description
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34. Pinterest
• An up-and-coming social network for pic and video sharing
• Set up pinboards
• Infographics and images with quotes do particularly well on Pinterest
– Examples of infographics: dailyinfographic.com, coolinfographics.com, infographicjournal.com
• Some external links pass PageRank and thus this is a particularly good social site to focus
on for SEO
• Find out who’s been pinning your stuff: http://pinterest.com/source/yoursitehere
• Good article: http://www.copyblogger.com/pinterest-marketing/
36. Social Bookmarking Sites
• Seed linkbait into social bookmarking sites
• Users add favorite web pages to an online
bookmarking service, such as:
– Delicious.com
• Items that are favorited a lot get pushed up to the
popular page
37.
38. Social Networks
• Build your social media profiles in the various social
networks
– Facebook
– LinkedIn
– Google+
– MySpace
– Niche social networks
– Meetup.com
– Wikipedia
• Optimize your profiles and get them to rank in the
Google search results
39. Facebook
• Facebook gets more time on site than Google
• Create Facebook Pages for your company, brand
• Microblog via status updates. Use HootSuite, or…?
• Define a username. It will give you a vanity
URL for Facebook Pages or profiles
– http://www.facebook.com/username/
• Create Facebook Groups for your events
• Develop a fan base (Facebook Fan Pages)
• Add the “Like” widget to your site's sidebar
• Create a Facebook app. Doesn't need to be sophisticated, just “remarkable”. (dare your
friends, bite your friends, farm, gift registry)
40. LinkedIn
• Add links to your website, blog, and one other URL and select “Other” so you can
specify the anchor text. No SEO credit though, the links are “nofollowed”
• Add a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) or two to your network.
– And/or become a LION yourself
• http://www.linkedin-makeover.com/2011/09/30/how-to-be-a-linkedin-lion/
– i.e. a “promiscuous sneezer” (in Seth Godin-speak)
• Add your email address to your
“professional headline” so folks 4+
degrees away don't have to waste
an InMail to contact you
• Post a “question” to LinkedIn Answers that serves your own purposes
– e.g. “We're looking to hire an SEO analyst and are willing to pay whatever it takes to get a top-notch
person. What job boards do you recommend?”
41. Google+
• Not a serious contender to Facebook… yet!
• Create a Google+ page for your business
(http://www.google.com/+/business/)
• Use rel=author markup on your website so that your
Google+ photo can appear in your Google search results
• Search Plus Your World = customized Google search results
• Hangouts are cool!
• Good article: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-plus-marketing-
guide/
42. Niche Social Networks
• For dog lovers
• For car enthusiasts
• For wine connoisseurs
• Etc.
43.
44.
45. Meetup.com
• Get involved with local Meetups and get your
meetup.com member profile page linked from
the meetup's page, which will pass juice to your
profile then on to your site
• Actually there are many social sites with profile
pages that pass link juice...
– http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/22-
dofollow-social-media-sites-offering-profile-links.html
47. Wikipedia
• Build up your street cred (long & virtuous contribution history,
user profile page with Barnstar awards) before doing anything
at all self-serving.
• A link on a high-profile article is worth gold, as it builds your
credibility & visibility with journalists and bloggers. Negotiate
with an article's “owner” to get this.
• Monitor your articles with a tool that emails you (e.g.
trackengine, changenotes, urlywarning, changedetect). Don't
just rely on Wikipedia's “Watch” function
• Flow PageRank internally with Disambiguation pages, Redirects,
Categories
• Make friends. They will back you up in AfDs
• Don't edit anonymously from work. (Have you heard of
WikiScanner??)
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49. Blogs
• First, get involved via comments and build rapport
• Careful about making the commenter name keyword-rich
• Comment on blogs that “dofollow” comment links
– e.g. Mark Cuban's Blogmaverick.com, Rimm-Kaufman Group's
www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog
• Submit to blog carnivals. Host one (requires that you have a blog).
Start a new one.
– http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2008/02/blog-carnivals-a-link-building-
secret-weapon
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50. Blogs
• Be a contributor to a group blog (e.g. BusinessBlogConsulting.com,
Shop.org Blog)
• Be a guest blogger on someone else's blog (e.g. TechGazing.com*,
Problogger.net)
• A Tip Jar indicates the blogger is desperate for cash
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51. Real-World Networking
• Build relationships with bloggers by networking with them at
blogger conferences, unconferences and meetups
• Register and attend conferences that link to their attendees
(e.g. WordCamp, Gnomedex)
• Contribute to conference wikis (where you've attended!)
• Give free talks at libraries, campuses (e.g. Stanford
TechBriefings)
• Get involved with local Meetups and get your meetup.com
member profile page linked from the meetup's page, which will
pass juice to your profile then on to your site
• Invite W3C to speak. Get a link to your event on
www.w3.org/WAI/
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52. Q&A
• To contact me: stephan@stephanspencer.com
• Follow me on Twitter: @sspencer
• Email admin@stephanspencer.com for
– a copy of this PowerPoint
– my SEO Metrics webinar recording
– my SEO Best & Worst Practices checklist
– my SEO Myths white paper
