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vineri, 20 ianuarie 2012
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Using Social Media Profiles for ORM Graywolf's SEO Blog
Using Social Media Profiles for ORM Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Using Social Media Profiles for ORM Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:28 AM PST
Whenever you are involved in an ORM (Online Reputation Management) campaign, your goal is to displace negative results in the search engines with positive results. In a previous post we looked at creating microsites. In this post, we are going to look at leveraging social media profiles. As with every search result in Google, the top results are generally made up of the most trusted and authoritative results, so it makes the most sense for us to talk about the most trusted authoritative social media sites at the moment: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google plus. Facebook is by far one the most popular and visited sites in social media; however, for many people, it can also be the most problematic. The most common issue on Facebook is people or their friends posting unflattering or unflattering status updates or pictures. That status update or pic from that party weekend in Cancun where you …. let’s just not even mention it again … may have been funny at the time, but it’s not funny when you are applying for a job, trying to get the condo board to think you are a qualified, responsible tenant, or trying to prove that drunk driving incident really wasn’t you. Thanks to Facebook’s new timeline feature, it makes it incredibly easy for someone to skim through your profile and isolate those “wild college years.” My suggestion? Create a “close friends” group and edit all those items so only they can see them (see How to Create a Friend List). Alternatively, you could “go nuclear” and just block all the old info on your timeline. It’s much more drastic but also a lot more bulletproof. If you are a company, you may not have those drunken college years to contend with, but you may not have a rich history, or even a profile. If you don’t have a profile, start one. I’d link to a resource but, to be honest, Facebook changes so often that the link would need to be updated every few months. Instead, just Google it [how to create a business profile on facebook]. Sadly, we all now have to treat our Facebook status updates like a Public Relations team. Don’t post anything outlandish or crazy that you don’t want to be associated with. An alternative course is to regularly post completely off the wall crazy information that is completely unbelievable. This gives you a bit of wiggle room and allows you to have plausible deniability. This really is only an option for personal accounts and not businesses. The next site you need to focus on is Twitter. Again, if the person or company you are doing ORM for doesn’t have an account, you’ll need to get one going ASAP. The more trusted and authoritative your Twitter account is, the better it will rank in the SERPs. While Klout isn’t perfect, it’s a good place to start. If the Twitter account isn’t posting content now on a regular basis, you’ll need to start. To get the most out of social media with the least amount of time, I suggest using Hootsuite and or Bufferapp (see How to be Involved on Twitter in Less than an Hour a day). Post good content, share good links, respond when someone talks to you (using the @ symbol). If you want to drive your Klout score up, get followed by people who already have a high Klout score. Have conversations back and forth with them ( it’s the back and forth that really counts). This advice holds true for a business account as well as for a personal one. Most people who have jobs have, at the very least, a LinkedIn account. If they haven’t changed jobs or at least tried to get new job in the past few years, their LinkedIn profile is probably outdated and could use some updating. Within the past few years, LinkedIn has added the ability to create company pages (see creating company profiles on LinkedIn). If you are doing ORM for a company, please ask all of your key employees to create profiles and to update their profiles to link to the company profile. Google PlusGoogle Plus is the latest serious player in the social media profile space. At the time this post was written Google had made some serious aggressive changes to “force” Google Plus results, giving them higher and greater exposure. Whether this is a long term change that will stick remains to be seen. At the very least the person you are doing ORM work for should claim and create a Google Plus profile. However, for maximum results, they will need to verify the profile and connect it to articles or posts they have written (see How To Create A Google Author Account). If you are doing ORM for a business or organization, see how to create a Google plus profile for your business. Again, these services are in flux so the actual steps may change. You could simply set up these profiles, but to get the most out of them you need to keep them looking as “lived in” as possible. That means updating semi-regularly and connecting or being friends with other users and having a dialog or conversation with some of them. With the exception of Google+, all of these services have API’s so you can update them with tools on a scheduled basis such as Hootsuite or Bufferapp. Once you have these accounts looking lived in, you can start pointing links to them. You want to use optimal anchor text (ie, the person’s name or name of the company in most cases). However, you do want there to be some variation. If 100% of the links pointing to a site have a 100% anchor text match, it look manipulated and and artificial, so mix it up a bit. You can do some interlinking but be careful: interlinking all of them, creating a nest of sites, link brothel, or artificial link pyramid designed just to manipulate link equity will stick out and will probably be discounted. While I only spoke about four social sites in this article, there are hundreds of websites you can create profiles on for ORM. It doesn’t make sense to try and set up and populate all of them. If you want to establish them and prevent someone else from squatting on them, use a service like KnowEm. Once you have them secured, you can cherry pick the best or most appropriate ones to flesh out and work with. So what are the takeaways from this post:
photo credit: Shutterstock/82048177 No related posts. This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
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What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs - Whiteboard Friday
What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs - Whiteboard Friday |
| What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 19 Jan 2012 12:45 PM PST Posted by randfish What happens when you have a page that ranks very well, but it isn't the page that pulls in the sales that you need? Often times the page that does convert very well is "boring" and subsequently ranks poorly. Video TranscriptionThe transcription for this video will be coming soon. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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West Wing Week: "The Time is Always Right to Do What is Right"
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SEOptimise
SEOptimise |
| Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 Edition)? Posted: 20 Jan 2012 02:26 AM PST Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?
With Danny Sullivan following up to say:
So reading into this, I would suggest that if this wasn’t rolled out last year - it just has been! Google has stated that this isn’t a change which will affect every site that has ads above the fold, just those that have an excessive number of ads which obstruct users from getting to the content that they were searching for:
So that means that if you’ve been penalised, it should be easy enough to get out of. It’s an algorithmic penalty, not a manual one – so if you fix the layout of your page, Google’s filters will pick this up the next time it’s re-crawled and whatever penalty you had previously will be lifted. We’ve seen this many times with other algorithm penalties – and once you figured out what’s caused the drop in rankings, it’s not too difficult to get out of. It’s the manual penalties you want to avoid, Google take note! And overall it’s not likely to affect a huge number of sites (1% predicted by Google), but it looks like affiliates and ad monetised sites are those most open to suffering. So is this the latest, unofficial panda update? Maybe Google has just got bored of keeping track of the numbers now that it’s 2012 – what do you think? Image credit: David Allen © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 Edition)? Related posts:
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| Posted: 18 Jan 2012 02:23 PM PST Over the last few months I have been trying to work on improving my time management skills, not only at work but in my personal life as well. I am forever being told that I am late or don’t do anything on time, and that is just from the wife. So I took to improving my time management skills, and thought that I would share with you a few techniques that I am using now in my working life.
Time Planning Whether you have your time scheduled out for you by management or you prefer to manage your time yourself, ensure that you plan your work in advance. I use a spreadsheet within Google Docs to create a monthly calendar that I populate with the hours that I need to complete, for the forthcoming month. By planning your month in advance, you know exactly what is in store for you on a daily basis. It provides you with the flexibility to move your schedule around to suit the needs of your clients and any unexpected changes that may happen. Communicating via email is a great way to get information to and from your clients and contacts quickly, but it can be a massive distraction. I, like most others, get distracted by emails and tend to reply immediately to any queries that come through, taking your attention away from what you are currently doing. If this happens several times throughout the day you are potentially taking an hour or more of productivity out of your day. Recommedation: Check your emails at certain times during the day, and closing it during the other times. Email Categories/Labels Prioritising emails can help save you a large amount of time. Most people, myself included, set up rules that move emails straight into allocated folders. I find this a very useful trick to keep my inbox organised, allowing me to find specific emails quickly. As well as using rules, I would recommend using the categories (outlook) or labels (gmail) to separate emails that need to be actioned. Recommendation: To-Do Lists To me, knowing what I am doing on a daily/weekly basis is an essential part of managing my time correctly. Personally I think the best way of organising your work is by having a to-do list. I am such a big believer of this that I actually have three to-do list methods. I know it’s a bit over the top but hey, it seems to work for me. :) 1. Remember the Milk: I do however, use it for work when I am on the move and need to add something to my to-do list. Using the iPhone application I record anything that I think of whilst I am not at the office or don’t have my notepad with me. If I have made any notes whilst I am out, I transfer any tasks that have been created to the most relevant to-do list. 2. Project Management Tools – Monthly To-do Lists: In Basecamp I plan out the next three months worth of work for all my clients, split into monthly to-do lists. Doing this allows me to tick off the tasks on completion. An example monthly to-do list might include the following: Although the list tends to be a lot bigger, you get the general gist of what I mean about the monthly to-do lists. Using project management tools such as Basecamp allows you to share the work that needs to be done with the rest of your team, whilst also providing visibility to the client on what work has and will be carried out. 3. Written To-do List – Weekly: At the end of each week I take time to look at the monthly to-do lists and write a weekly task list on my notepad for the following week. This would generally include more detailed information. Example: Time Sheeting Keeping track of what you do for your clients on an hourly/daily/weekly basis is important, not just for you but for your agency. There are many ways that you can keep track of the time you have spent on a particular project, either manually using spreadsheets or using a database driven tool. My personal preference is using a tool called Harvest to track time. Harvest allows you to do much more than just time tracking. It includes invoicing, expenses, reports, etc, which are all very valuable. To me the time tracking aspect of the product is great – you create projects and tasks that you record time against as and when you work on a specific client. As you begin to track your time against the projects you are working on you can see how much time has been spent, how much is left and where the time has been spent. From a project management perspective the account manager can see what the team has been working on and who has done what very quickly by running a quick query.
These are just five techniques that I believe can help improve your time management when working on your projects. Now I just need to solve my personal time management skills to make the wife happy :). What techniques do you have for managing your time? Do you agree with my suggestions? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions in the comments below. Image credit – Roby Ferrari on Flickr. © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Time Management for SEO Related posts:
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