Social Media Audit – Is your Website Utilizing Social Media?

In this Posting we will examine:

• How to Integrate Social media with your website
• How to get better Rankings using  Social Media
• How make your website more interactive

Your Blog

In one of our previous posts we talked about the importance of content syndication. By producing well planned, informational blog articles you can achieving good rankings for both medium & long tail keyword phrases in Google’s SERPS.

This not only helps create brand awareness through organic search. If used correctly, your blog can be used to syndicate your website content to many different sources all over the web.

First of all, to maximize your websites visibility,your blog should be attached to your domain name. Frequently, I see companies that use external blog URLS’s on Blogger.com or Wordpress.

For example, they might have www.myblog.wordpress.com. Implementing a blog this way is only building the authority of the Wordpress site. When you eventually migrate to your own hosting solution, e.g. www.mydomain.com/blog, any backlinks you’vre built up will be lost when you migrate!

Search engines and people like fresh content. If you are starting a company or personal blog, try and get into the habit of posting an article once or twice a week. This is obvious right? Of course it is, but starting and maintaining a blog is not something you should get into lightly. You need to set aside 3-4 hours per week to research, write, edit and publish one or two really good articles.  If your company is starting a new blog make sure that the person responsible has enough time within their diary to actually write the content.

If you produce good content, the page rank of your blog URL will increase over time from people linking back to your articles. When your page rank increases, any additional internal cross linking and other link strategies become much more effective, leading to greater visibility for your website.

Open Source CMS:

Joomla and Wordpress are two of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS). Many websites and blogs run on either Wordpress or Joomla because they are flexible platforms with large user support communities, and they’re free. They allow you to get access to some great plug-ins which can really create a different methods of customer interaction on your blog page.

In terms of choosing a publishing platform, I would highly recommend Wordpress as my preferred blogging tool. It’s really easy to integrate with your website. The learning curve is very gentle and as it’s open source there are tons of plugins to enhance the functionality of the tool.

You can even design your own webpage or blog themes for different content management systems using a program called Artisteer. It’s really easy to use and when you’re done you can simply extract the theme as a plug-in and upload it to your server.

Some of the social media plug- in’s you can implement in WordPress also really help with content syndication, allowing you to build up a huge network of followers and help promote your brand off your website.

By installing Twitter and Facebook plug ins your can help spread good “word of mouse” campaigns across different social networks, making your website content visible to people all over the web.

It might be a good idea to set up both email and RSS applications on you blog page too. Feedburner is the most common RSS application.This brings your news and articles to your audience, instead of them coming looking for it.

The SERP’s are competitive enough as it is, so if someone reads an article that they like on your blog, they should be given the option to receive regular updates from that blog.

Twitter

We all know how powerful Twitter is. Anyone that reads one of your blog postings or views an interesting webpage should have the option to tweet (syndicate) that URL to all their followers.

When you check your web analytics you’ll be able to check  how many visits you received from Twitter , right down to the actual  individual piece of content.

Twitter can give a specific webpage even more visibility on its network with some of its recent developments, including Twitter Search and Google’s Real Time Search.

Twitter search is great for people searching for “real time” content.Its quite a handy PR tool in that sense too. You can now see any fresh content that is tweeted in a matter of seconds without having to wait for Google to index it! Try searching for recent tweets related to your business using Twitter Search.

Real time search is now becoming a big feature on Google’s organic listings page. When you search on certain topics you will now see a live feed of tweets that are related to that topic. See below for an example.

You can also track each tweet using Hootsuite. This application also has a handy PR tool which will allow you to see who is mentioning your brand across the Twitter Network.

Twitter is now integrated with Social Networking Giants’ Facebook and Linkedin. So when you “tweet” it can automatically go straight to both your profiles on these social sites.

If you produce a good article there’s no telling how many times it can get tweeted. The more places the article appears, the more chances it has of being re tweeted.

Images

Image optimization is another strategy that is often overlooked. Flickr is one of the best online photo management and sharing applications on the web. Anything you upload onto its network should really be traceable back to your website.

Flickr acts as an “image search engine” and can be very effective in driving traffic to your website. If you tag your images appropriately when you upload them to Flickr or any other photo sharing website, you will increase your chances of being found for different keyword searches on these websites..

You can also attach your Facebook or Linkedin profile information to images on the Flickr Search network, making even more sources available for people to see you brand when they search for an image related to your business.

Video

YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the web. In recent posts we discussed how important it was to optimize your Youtube tags. Any videos that you make for your business, should be uploaded to Youtube and easily traceable back to your website.

More and more people are beginning to explore brands on YouTube . People are now using it as a learning center. Whether it’s companies promoting their brands, or individuals just reviewing different products, Youtube is becoming a huge information source for web users.

With Google’s new interface, vertical search engines (images, video, blog, news) are going to used even more. SEO professionals tasked with doing a website audit are going to have broaden their scope to include all areas of online marketing, not just on-page and off-page SEO.

Bookmarketing

Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. This can be done publicly or privately (in private groups), or a combination of the two.

People who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them using a variety of different functions to sort and tag them. If used effectively, social bookmarking can have a very positive effect on the visibility and authority of your website.

The tagging and descriptions used in bookmarking is referred to as external meta data and can have huge benefits in SEO, because the information used in the tagging is not controlled by the site owners, but by the public.

In essence, the information in external meta tags can be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text.

Remember, if a social bookmarking sites uses nofollow links, then your website will not gain the link juice benefits from back links.

However, don’t overlook the power of social bookmarking, especially for the major sites which use No Follow, because their tags and external Meta data can still be used to qualify and classify major sites.

Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are two of major social bookmarking sites to join because even if you don’t get the long-term link benefits of a No Follow, you’ll have the long term benefits of external Meta data, votes and traffic.

Facebook

Facebook enables you to create a buzz around your product or business in a familiar environment for the customer. Having your Facebook integrated with your website is very beneficial for increasing its visibility. This has been done up to now very successfully via Facebook Connect.

Any webpage on your website that has a frequent flow of traffic should have the Facebook Connect icon on it. It’s a simple way of branding your website at absolutely no cost or effort.

The “F share” button is also a useful icon to have beside any blog posting on your website to allow readers to syndicate your content  to all of their friends on Facebook with just the click of a mouse.

Due to the recent implementation of Facebook’s new “Open Source Protocol“, we saw it fit to implement the Facebook “like” button to all our blog postings. Facebook seems to be heading on the direction of creating a Social Search Network, so why not jump on the bandwagon early!

Your Faebook page will also usually rank very high in SERPS. Sometimes even higher then your website for certain keyword searches! So waste no time in setting up a presence on this Social Networking giant.

Linkedin

Some Social Networking sites like LinkedIn have the “follow” attribute enabled so you can put your company website on your public profile and your website will gain some benefit due to LinkedIn’s high authority.

You can also engage with your industry specific audience by starting discussions or posting news articles in the appropriate groups. This can generate a huge amount to traffic to your website.

I’d recommend you download Hootsuite. This free piece of software provides you with a very efficient way of posting links to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook at the same time. This saves you time and effort by not having to log into your accounts in all of these sites and post your links separately.

Slideshare

Slideshare is another great way to increase you brand awareness. This allows you to upload different presentations which can then be traced back to your website. Its integrated with Facebook and Linkedin now also, giving you more channels to show off your presentations to different audiences.

What about your experience of Social Media? Have you  or your business used it successfully? Was it to drive sales or customer engagement?

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