Day 4
Track 1: SMO: Social Media Optimization
Platform Members:
Neil Patel of ACS
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
Todd Malicoat of stuntdubi
So this session is pretty cool. Even after being search blast bombed the night before, they still seem to present with energy and humor! This is gonna be a fun ride!
Social Media websites or community built websites allow content to be shared with “tagging” methods. We talk about SEO strategies for working with this.
So when you launch your SMO, be sure to submit to bookmarking sites via a trusted account or link evangelist.
Hit List:
Digg
Netscape
StumbleUpon
Reddit
De.licio.us
Logistics of Social Media:
1. Uses site to jump off of to other sites.
2. Digg link bait. Send out a mass im.
3. Don’t let your server crash! Can you handle the traffic your site will incur? – Search “digg/slashdot effect“‘
Results are often times:
1. 30-50 k “nearly worthy” visitors
2. Important anchor text linking back to you derived from your title
Quick Tip #1: What you really want are links from HIGH QUALITY and high profile sites like CNN. Make your content worthy.
Quick Tip #2: You are not going to sell to them with AdSense!
Quick Tip #3: Maintain a relationship. Provide RSS subscribes to encourage future traffic.
Next up to bat, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz reminding us first and foremost…NEVER EVER EVER advertise with social media. They will HATE you.
What is SMO?
Creating profiles on Web 2.0 sites.
Why SMO?
Goal:
1. Building relationships.
2. Control market & participate. Find out what people think about you and your industry.
3. Reputation – management. If someone writes something about you that you don’t want at #1 in the search engines, you better be an active part of the community for preventative maintenance purposes!
4. Drive traffic, mind share and branding through UGC (user generated content) sites.
Where To Conduct SMO?
1. YouTube
2. StumbleUpon
3. Wikipedia
4. Yahoo Answers
5. Digg
6. Yelp – For local business reviews
7. Reddit – Good link bait for a more serious user
8. LinkedIn – business networking
9. Flickr – for images ***No “nofollow” tags here 🙂
10. Netscape
11. Del.icio.us
12. Facebook
13. MySpace
14. Craigslist – “Best of Craiglist” is best!
15. Amazon – If you provide content
16. Technorati – If you have a blog.
17. newsvine
18. Sphinn – SEO/geeks here 🙂
19. City Search
20. Helium – for content
21. WikiHow – How To Guides
22. SecondLife – Its a game. Trend is dying.
23. Twitter
Our next speaker was Neil Patel starting off by discussing how to leverage Digg.
First, know that the Digg community is a bunch of babies! Its 15-25 yr old geeks who like wit, stupid humor and geeky gadgets.
Want to get their attention? Appeal to the silly young ins by offering pictures of urinals across the world and other stupid fun facts!
Important Factors:
1. Number of votes
2. Time
3. Voters
4. Submitters
5. Friends
Don’t Do This:
1. Self promote! Biased based info is spotted quickly and not accepted well.
2. Pay for votes.
3. Break rules
4. Spam
You will get banned!
Do Do This:
1. Friends – Go get em!
2. Participate in a community of profiles with similar interests. Again, it make you trusted!
3. Use great titles for linking and branding purposes.
4. Become a Top User
5. Submit at the right time!
The questions that followed provoked this statement form the panel…
Quick Fact: Statistics show that if you are #4 or 5 in ranking in a search engine and you have an image to coordinate with your site listing (see Universal Search), you get more traffic than #1-3 without an image or video. That’s amazing!!!!!!!
If you are looking for accurate links back right now (since everyone wants to remove their site: capabilities ahem) simply check out blogsearch.google.com or Technorati.
The panel also mentioned that the purpose of SMO is integrating traffic for popularity. You don’t necessarily want to convert. It’s almost considered spamming. You are not there to self promote! This is situational though! If you are offering good widgets, gadgets or other geek tools and you release content that manages to get popular on Digg, you may see some conversion. Thats okay. Just remember, it is not your intent!
Couple other sites mention by audience member:
Facebook Apps
MyBlogLog
I’m gonna go build some profiles now. For me and my aliases 🙂 Oooooh…I always wanted to be taller, smarter and wear a cape! Oh never mind.
Posted By: Angela Collins
Cal Coast Web Design
