Using Social Media to Increase Your Search Rank

The shifting rules of search mean that social media is more valuable than ever

The rules of search have changed. In fact, they change on a daily basis. But never so dramatic has rank been uprooted since the explosion of social media. Social media sites, especially the powerhouses of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have become back-link central for affecting organic search results.

 Social media’s influence on driving business via the web is expected to surpass SEO in 2013, according to eMarketer. Web marketers and PR professionals must pay attention to how social media affects search, and ultimately how it can change the rules of online visibility and (online) brand engagement.

Changing the Game

Prior to Facebook’s takeover of the online universe (800 million active users today), online visibility in natural search was a sum of several, measurable components: SEO site compliance on site structure and meta tags/content, directory link submissions, and qualified and relevant site/blog linking. In 2010, the game officially changed, with Google’s support of social media—author reputation, bookmarking, and commenting, as well as a number of other social factors (likes, tweets, re-tweets, shares)—as a major factor in how it will rank websites and blogs in its algorithm. Real-time search in Google meant that search was only as valuable as the latest blog post, social share, and comment.

 Today, the line is blurring. And this causes some confusion for web marketers. Should they focus on optimizing and driving traffic to their social pages? To their web site? Where does their online brand live? How do they communicate their brand value proposition, whether their personal or corporate brand?

 The good news is that technology has advanced so that web marketers can manage their content and sites through the use of simple and effective blogging tools. Further, that those blog tool properties, such as WordPress, support integration of social plug-ins, and necessary content for social sharing, including video, effective product/service literature, and tagged imagery. And so, marketers can use social and manage their web presence to support online brand consistency.

How to Take Advantage of Social Media

So how can you use social media to increase your SEO rank and ensure that the rank and ensuing traffic will convert to business? First, you must create and understand a parallel social media optimization (SMO) / search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. All creators of content on your team (copy, social commenting, videos, and imagery) need to be on one brand team. The approach must be holistic. A unified brand message must drive visibility across all content, all channels.



To define a common strategy for execution across standard search engine optimization practices as well as across social media content development and sharing, marketers must re-think keyword development. The questions become less about search visibility vs. obvious competition and more introspective in terms of what the corporate and executive brand mean. Ask your team questions such as: What is our brand value proposition? What do we want our audience to say about us? How will we incent out audience? How will we be leaders? Why will people follow us? Answering these questions will help you to zone in on your top branded, broad and narrow-based keywords.

Once these target keyword phrases have been developed, you will require an actionable task plan to follow and with which to measure effectiveness of you new blended social/SEO strategy. Within needs to be: content types and frequency, planned outreach per social channel, and media (social) buys/ads with effective messaging and resulting goals. Determining success in social affects search visibility such that quality of the author, relevancy of the topical content, number of followers, number of comments/re-tweets, number of shares of blog posts must be considered and followed for search visibility to pull from success in these metrics.

When determining how you will rank in natural search for branded and business-driving keywords, first do the ABCs of SEO work in terms of on-site optimization wherever your online marketing plan calls for conversion. Once that has been completed, reign in your social and search teams to determine your custom strategy and measurable plan. Remember that, just like traditional SEO practices, SMO work must be consistent, authentic, managed daily and measured for success.

How to do Keyword Research the Easy Way

Keyword research is one of the first things that most internet marketers should learn. Whether you’re doing PPC, SEO, article syndication, or anything else- keyword research is a good, good thing.That said, I’m amazed at how complicated people can make it sometimes! I see it all the time; a new marketer goes through the follow stages-

1)Learn about IM
2)Get excited about making tons and tons of money
3)Jumps in without really learning the basics
4)Fails
5)Comes back to learn the basics
6)Gets confused (sometimes about keyword research, sometimes it’s something else)
7)Tries again (maybe)
8)Gets frustrated
9)Quits

Does that sound about right?

Now I know that some parts of IM are confusing and require constant learning. But keyword research isn’t one of those things. When it comes to selecting good keywords, here are the 3 principles I live by:

Principle #1: Look for Buying KeywordsThis is probably the most important of the 3 principles. You can make money without buying keywords, but it won’t come as easily.
So what’s a buying keyword? There are a few things to look for:
Product namesProduct name + review, reviews, scam, discount, coupon, cheapBuy, cheap, discount, best + product type (best vacuums, cheap washers, buy red high heels, etc.)The people typing in these keywords often have a credit card in hand, ready to spend some money. They’re either ready to buy, or doing research right before they buy. These are the visitors that convert like crazy! If someone is looking for a Fat Burning Furnace review, they’re thinking of buying Fat Burning Furnace. It’s as easy as that.

If you focus on buying keywords, you really don’t need many visitors to your site every day. Your visitors will convert much better than most, so making good money won’t take thousands and thousands of visitors.

Principle #2: Look for Desperate PeopleI know that sounds bad, but I don’t know how else to put it!When you’re desperate, you have a problem that you want fixed now. Doesn’t that sound like someone who might buy your product? After all, your product does solve problems, right?Let’s say that someone’s having marital problems, and things are getting bad. They might go to Google searching for something like:
I need to save my marriage
My wife is leaving me
My wife left me
My wife doesn’t love me anymore

Anyone typing in those kinds of things is asking for help. They have a severe problem, and you can help them fix it with your product.**HINT** Most desperate buyers will either have health, finance, or relationship issues. People don’t get desperate about World of Warcraft or shoes.

Principle #3: More Doesn’t Mean BetterMany new marketers think that when it comes to visitors, more is better. While you might still make some sales, you always want to niche down at least 2 or 3 levels.For example, let’s say that you’re promoting Fat Burning Furnace. Do you think the keyword “lose weight” is good?The truth is that it’s okay, but it’s still not very great. You have no idea who is typing that into Google.
They may be 5 pounds overweight or 500.
It might be a woman who has never worked out a day in her life, or a guy who works out every day and just can’t shed that last layer of fat.
But really, you can’t even be sure if they’re trying to learn how to lose weight!
That is probably what they want, but it’s not what they typed into Google.
Now, let’s take the keyword “how to lose weight”. You’ll get fewer searches each month, but at least you know what they’re looking for. However, you still run into the fact that it’s not specific at all.Finally, let’s look at someone typing in “how to lose weight for new mothers.” This won’t get tons and tons of searches each month, but at least you know who is searching for a solution. Now you can really target your audience, explaining how Fat Burning Furnace is the best way to lose weight for new mothers because of X, Y and Z.

Conclusion
There is more to keyword research than this- but when you really get to the core, this is pretty much all you need to know.Now I admit that when you throw in SEO or PPC competition, you get into a whole new ballgame. Competition is fierce for a lot of keywords, but you can still find some gems out there.If your game is SEO, then I can’t recommend highly enough that you get a good keyword research tool. My personal favorite is Market Samurai but there are some other good ones as well.Thanks for reading, and I hope this article helped clear up some confusion about keyword research!

Linkedin Masterclass: Maximising Your Linkedin Profile

Maximising Your Linkedin Profile

Your Linkedin profile IS one of the most powerful tools available to any individual or business trying to network, market and do business online.
Here are the Top 10 Rules for maximising the potential of your profile:
1. 100% Completion:- Profiles that are 100% complete are more easily indexed by not only the Linkedin search engine but by all search engines.

2. Upload a good photo:- Uploading a Logo is a bad move. There are company pages and groups for you to add your logo so don't be shy and add a nice picture.

3. Have recommendations:- below are our top 5 Tips for this section

4. Personalise your Website and blog links:
"my company"
"my blog"
"my lack of imagination"

Yes, by naming the links "my company" etc you are telling the search engines what there links are BUT by selecting the drop down then "Other" you can have a bigger SEO impact and tell your profile visitors what they will find at the end of these links.

Summary":- Pack your Summary with "Keyword Rich" information to assist with your SEO. Another tip is to actually tell people who you want to connect with and who you want to do business with. Say something like "We are looking to connect with..." "We are ideally looking to assist..."

6. Integrate your Twitter account with your LinkedIn Profile. You can feed to your tweets to your LinkedIn account so that every time you tweet it updates your LinkedIn page. Believe me this is huge! According to LinkedIn:
" LinkedIn works with Twitter� to make your Twitter account visible on your Profile. To add your Twitter account(s) to your LinkedIn Profile take the following steps:

1. Click on 'Edit Profile' under 'Profile' from your home page.

2. Click on the 'Add your Twitter profile' link in the blue box of your LinkedIn Profile. This will take you to a Twitter page.

3. Enter your Twitter credentials and then click on 'Allow'. This process confirms your Twitter ID. If successful, you will receive a confirmation message that the Twitter ID was added to your LinkedIn account and then you'll be taken to your LinkedIn Twitter Settings.

4. Select the 'Twitter Settings' (affects visibility) of this Twitter ID on your Profile.

5.Click 'Save Changes'. You should receive a success message saying that your settings were saved.

7. Applications:- This section is one of the most powerful areas of your Linkedin Profile. It has the power to save you time in running your profile, showcasing your company skills, providing content and much more.
8. Don't use a work email as the primary linkedin address:- A client had signed up for Linkedin a year or so before using his work email account. the account lay dormant for a while and the client moved on to another employer. worse, he forgot his password for the account. Linkedin offers the following helpful tip for those who no longer have access to the primary email account " Well we did tell you to use more than one email when you set up" Basically its Game Over. You have to start all over again. You have lost that profie, the recommendations and all the content that goes with it.

9. Personalize your LinkedIn account by claiming your name in the URL, e.g. http://linkedin.com/in/itsrichardmoore

Here's how (via LinkedIn)
Click on "Edit Profile" from the "Profile" dropdown menu found in the top navigation bar of the home page.
Click on "Edit" next to the "Public Profile" area.
Click on "Edit" next to the "Your Public Profile URL" area at the top of the page.

Enter your new custom URL. Most custom URLs must start with http://www.linkedin.com/in/ and must contain 5-30 alphanumeric characters.
Click on "Set Address".

Once you've completed your custom URL it's important to publicize it in your other online accounts such as your website, blog, or Facebook Page, as well as on your business card and in your email signature.

10. Improve your connectability.
Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it's an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.

You can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

Expert Processes Expose How To Rank In Google

The primary thing you must figure out is that Google is your key customer and it is critical that you give the search engines precisely what they yearn for. Nearly everyone get this utterly incorrect and end up mistakenly somewhere out in cyber land. A reasonable question you should be asking yourself is what does Google want? How can I best help them and my intended customers?

Here are an assortment ofmethods that you can put into action immediately to improve your ranking results. The more of these techniques you have operating for you the greater your odds are of being revealed to the search engines clients. We can start out by being sure that the title of our website or page has the main keyword in it or is the main search term that we would like to rank for. It's also a good idea to have the keyword phrase as your domain name if it's obtainable.

Let's learn some optimization techniques that you can use to instantly improve your relevancy and placement results. It's always a magnificent idea to make use of multiple strategies as this successfully increases your odds of appearing before the engines viewers. We can begin by ensuring that the title of our internet site has the main key phrase in it or is the main keyword that we would like to rank for. It's suggested that you do a domain name search on the keyword phrase that you are trying to rank for as having your domain name the same as your key phrase gives you a boost in the search engines.

Here's what takes place behind the scenes in search engine land when someone searches on a search term phrase. Lets say someone does a search on "types of exotic fish." The engine will search for the keyword phrase exactly as it was typed across the internet in the following places: domain name, page title and subject matter of the page. If you have all of this in place that's a plus for you. Next the engine will look for keyword phrase density in the webpage subject matter. In other words it looks for how many times the keyword appears on the page in the relevant content. What is key phrase density anyway? Keyword phrase density is in basic terms how many times a key phrase is used on a webpage in relation to all the other words on the page. It's a ratio. This ratio should be between 1-3%.

Engines search for links to your web site in the form of backlinks as well as other sites that are linking directly to your website. The more internet sites that link to your website the more important a search engine will deem your site to be. Here's a few ways you can achieve back links: Submit content to article hosting web sites. Forum posts with your link in the post. Social media posts and fan pages. Post in book marking sites. Post optimized video clips. Submit to directory listings. Comment on other blogs. Contact other website site webmasters and exchange links with them.

Links to your site from other internet websites tell the engines that your website is worthy and has power. Here's an example you can relate to of social proof to a search engine. If you were going to choose an application for a smart phone and one had 500 thousand downloads and another had 20 which one would you choose as more relevant to your needs? The most would select the one with 500 thousand downloads. Websites are ranked in much the same way by the search engines programs in terms of links to your web page.

Speak to other webmasters and ask them to swap links with you. Some sites will happily trade links as the link exchange is a win win for you and the other website owner. The higher a internet site ranks that links to your website the greater the boost in the rankings to your site. The smart bots and spiders adore links. An effortless win is to be sure all your websites are linked as this also allows the spiders or bots to travel from one page to another very easily. Make sure that the key words or keyword phrases are visible in your website map.

Video tutorials should be integrated into your ranking strategy. When you make a video be doubly sure to use the key phrase you are trying to rank for in the video clip. Here is how to optimize a video: Make sure your key phrase is the file name. The title of your video should be identified with the precise search term your optimizing for and situated if at all possible at the begining of the title. To make sure relevant videos for its users, engines listen for the exact keyword in the video clip. The video tutorial web hosting site provides a box for a description. You will want to make absolutley certain to have your site url in there first followed by the search term you're trying to rank for. There should be no more than 60 characters total with no more than 5 search terms comprised of 20 or less characters each used in the tags box.

Strive to consistently strengthen your authority on a daily basis and in no time at all you'll own a colossal web existence. Subject matter duplication is looked at by the engines as a form of spam and they may reprimand you for this by sandboxing, banning or delisting your website. Outstanding web page rankings don't happen immediately. Grow your web existence optimizing for the search engines and your target audience & you will soon be dominating your niche all across the web.