WordPress and Google – Social Network Marketing Meets SEO

By now you all know that I am a strong proponent of WordPress, and using it along with quality content, is a recipe for success. The only problem that I have with WordPress is its self titled moniker, “just another WordPress weblog”. They are selling themselves short by sticking to the label: blogging platform. In reality WordPress is a very powerful content management system with powerful social network marketing tools and a solid SEO foundation, all things that Google loves. The key to success in Google is three-fold: quality content, inbound links and discussion. WordPress does all of those things, and does them well.

If you already have a website, the best game plan is to add a WordPress system as a directory using a quality keyword and having the directory as close to the root as possible. An example would be companyname.com/keyword/. If your domain already has your main keyword in it, don’t make the mistake of using it again as the name of your WordPress directory. In the unlikely event that you don’t already have a website for your business, then WordPress is a great stand-alone system to get going online. If you have a website, but it is under performing, flipping your site to a WordPress system will give you an incredible boost in the SERPS without taking forever for you to see results. Be clear about this one point though, if you choose WordPress as your content management system, you will have to create quality content on a regular basis.

Social Network Marketing as an SEO Tool

The concept of social network marketing as a powerful SEO tool died before it could become a reality when social networks bowed to Google and nofollowed their users outbound links. The fact is social networks that are related to business can still benefit a website through backlinks, but mainstream sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, etc. do not pass on link juice. This is an attempt by Google and other search engines to weed out spammers who use social networks to raise their inbound links through spam. On one hand I applaud this, but on the other I find it annoying since I have useful content, but can’t promote it on social networks. The bottom line is that the only way to succeed is to create content that your users will link to. You also need to open discussion on your site through comments. We offer plans that kick start commenting. Even though commenting is pretty anonymous, people still feel weird about being the first person to leave a comment or ask what they feel to be a stupid question. Get Found Now researches your content and asks the right questions that you answer promptly. Once the comments start flowing they snowball into a lot of organic activity that will naturally increase your rankings. It’s like your first high school dance,no one wants to be the first one to be on the dance floor. That is why we have come up with a service that gets the discussion going on your WordPress system. Owning The Discussion and Branding Through SEO is an article I wrote a while back that was inspired by Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool. The thing is, he is right, there is so much spam and weak user generated content out there that it is hard for legitimate websites to compete. Again, it is all about content!

If you have any questions about how to go about writing engaging content, getting discussion rolling on your website, WordPress blog design, or social network marketing give me a call at 866-418-3843 or post a comment below.

WordPress comes equipped with a powerful toolset for social network marketing and SEO. By using specific plugins as well as features already inherent to WordPress, you can set your system up to dominate the SERPS. The first place to start is deciding on which content you want to display to the search engines. There are two place to start with that:

1. Robots.txt File for WordPress SEO – the robots.txt file is where you notify the search engines where your sitemaps are as well as which pages, posts or directories that you don’t want the search engines to go. this holds true for all websites, not just WordPress sites. Leave a comment below if you have questions about robots.txt files.
2. On Page Meta Robots Tags- there are meta tags available that will control spiders and how they INDEX and FOLLOW both the content on the page as well as the links that are on the page. The truth is this subject warrants an entire post, but for now I will give you a quick overview. I use a plugin called All In One SEO Pack that will control on page Meta Robots Tags for category page, tag pages, archives and all posts and pages. All of those things lead down a dangerous path of duplicate content. You have to choose which content you are going to show the spiders. I am running 2 tests right now. One that is excluding everything but the original post and tag pages, and another one that is showing just categories and the post. The key here is to limit the amount of content shown on tag pages or category pages to just the tile and the first 300 or so characters. Even though that is not how my site is set up, you can see it in action at dtidata.com/resourcecenter where the category test is taking place. I am launching a new site called seobyyou.com where I will be testing the tag theory. I will keep everyone up to date on how the test goes. The initial results are leaning to the tag pages being opened up because there is more potential for keyword benefits because there are so many more tags.The basic game plan for pages that you don’t want spidered is to use the NOINDEX FOLLOW argument in on page meta tags. All In One SEO Pack does that, but you also have to coordinate that activity with your sitemap tool. In other words you don’t want to put archive and category pages in your sitemap and then tell spiders not to index them. This also holds true for all types of websites, you just have to do it manually. Leave a comment below if you have any questions.

Once you have identified what content you want to show the search engines and you have set up your road maps (sitemaps) and stop signs (robots.txt), you have given Google what it wants, an easy way to spider your site!

The next step is to incorporate into your sidebars links out to your recent comments, most popular posts and latest posts. You will have to tweak your files to insure that WordPress is not nofollowing your links from the sidebars into the recent comments, latest posts and most popular posts. The goal here is to show Google that there is discussion going on within your site. By answering comments quickly and giving good information, you will get inbound links, that is a fact.

If you have any questions or would like to set up a FREE no obligation report on your WordPress SEO, call 866-418-3843 or leave a comment below.

How Social Network Marketing Companies Can Survive This Economy

Social network marketing companies are having a challenge keeping business booming in a struggling economy. Since social network marketing is a fairly new strategy for most online businesses, it is not being seen as an essential part of their online marketing strategies. The challenge is in educating customers in the benefits of social network marketing and convincing them that it isn’t a fad or fly by night solution.

By now just about every business that has an online presence knows what SEO (search engine optimization) is, and that it is critical to their online survival. The goal is to tie social network marketing into traditional SEO practices in the minds of your customers. I have found that a lot of people aren’t totally sure what social network marketing is, especially when it comes to business applications.

We have success with social network marketing because we use it in conjunction with solid SEO tactics. This is the game plan that will get us all through the economic meltdown. It needs to start with WordPress. The only problem I have ever had with WordPress is its moniker – weblog. It is so much more than just another blogging system, it literally is the most powerful SEO tool that has ever been created. It will do the job right out of the box, but with several modifications, WordPress will propel your domain or website into the top of the SERPS and keep it there. You might ask “what’s the hitch”, but there isn’t one as long as you provide quality content on a regular basis.

Adding a WordPress system onto an existing static website is the best SEO solution. If you or your clients are creating a new Internet presence, then WordPress is the SEO / social network marketing one two punch that will allow you to OWN THE DISCUSSION on whatever topics that are in your online marketing strategy. The key to leveraging your existing search engine visibility is all in how dynamic your site is. I am not just talking about dynamic in the sense of database driven web pages, but dynamic in constantly evolving content that is updated by your site’s users through commenting.

Prior to kicking off campaigns on Facebook and MySpace, you must have a platform to deliver the rich media that makes social network marketing work. My next installment will show you what plugins are required for you to Own the Discussion within the search engines.

The Year In Review 2007

Everybody that has a marketing blog has written or will be writing a “year in review” article and even though I am something of a non-conformist, here is mine. From a business perspective 2007 has been a very good year for me and Get Found Now. I am not referring to financial success, which we had, but success that led to vindication of my ideas and techniques.

2007 was a year that many of the theories I had about using community based strategies for my client’s Internet presence management were proven. I have been using social network marketing type strategies for a long time, starting off with PHP Nuke and phpBB as integral parts of Internet web site strategies. It was mainly due to security issues that I got away from these forums to a more secure system – WordPress.

Even though I always knew that having social aspects to a website was a great way to interact with site visitors, the forum system wasn’t really search engine friendly. That is what makes WordPress special, the way it interacts with search engines, and how it can be a powerful stand-alone system or better yet, a part of a larger web site structure.

WordPress has 2 things that make it so powerful:

1. XML-RPC - it automatically updates search engines and other directory or news sites every time your site is modified. This is vital to keeping your site fresh in the eyes of search engines. Having spiders crawling your site 2 or 3 times a day is mighty powerful mojo. My post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing has a lot more info on XML-RPC including the directories you should be using.
2. RSS – it is meant to be syndicated. RSS syndication is going to be the next big thing. Most of my readers already know all about RSS, but the general web user doesn’t fully understand or use RSS. This is even more apparent to site owners and companies that use the Internet. Now that social network marketing is seen as a legitimate marketing tool in the business world, the next big step is RSS integration. See my post RSS Syndication Explained for more details.

I have to say that the best part of 2007 for me was the legitimizing of social network marketing and seeing my theories about RSS connectivity work for me and my clients. Now lets take a look at what happened in 2007 that made these things possible.

Social Network Marketing Takes The Stage

The absolute popularity of sites like FaceBook, Digg, MySpace, You Tube and Flickr pushed social network marketing into the spotlight, but even more important was the way mainstream industries like real estate embraced it. 2007 will be remembered mostly for the amount of money spent by major companies like Google and Microsoft on social network marketing ventures. All the big online players threw their hats into the Web 2.0 ring spending billions of dollars on social media sites that have yet to have a substantial plan for monetization. To me this is reminiscent of the “dot bomb” spending debacle of the 90’s, but then what do I know?

For those of you new here, I am going to digress and give you a quick insight into just what Web 2.0 is. In 2004 Dale Dougherty, an O’Reilly executive, coined the phrase Web 2.0. He and Tim O’Reilly explain Web 2.0 as opposed to what the World Wide Web used to be (Web 1.0):

Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication

Here’s a graphic from the page as well that is a good visualization:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you that prefer a video explanation there is an awesome video on my Social Network Marketing Web 2.0 Explained  post that visualizes Web 2.0

The fact is Web 2.0, social network marketing or whatever you want to call it, is here to stay and 2007 has proved it.

Search Engines Expand Their Results

The other major event of 2007 as far as I am concerned is related to search engines. The major engines changed the way that they display the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to include more media and other goodies. This can actually be put in the Web 2.0 category since the changes in the SERP’s put media in the top 10 results and certainly gives even more credence to social network marketing.

All the major search engines added what is now referred to as blended searches to their index results. It all started in May when Google launched Universal Search (Read The Changing Face Of Google). The next major search engine to jump on the social search bandwagon was Ask.com with their Ask3D. Live Search joined the party in September, and Yahoo added its blended search results in October along with the useless Search Assist.

These changes have had and will have a major impact on search engine optimization. SEO guys are going to have change their game and actually think about marketing! I had a feeling this was coming as you can see in SEO is Dead Long Live SEO. The fact is that blended search is a good thing for me and my clients and for all of you that follow our school of thought. You just have to make content the king of your site, have a means to stay in touch with the search engines through XML-RPC or XML site maps, and use WordPress! If you don’t have these things and want to get cracking visit my page Internet Presence Management to find out how Get Found Now can help you out.

I hope that 2007 was as good for you as it was for us. Happy New Year!

Technorati Tags A No Go

A lot of webmasters, especially bloggers, use Technorati Tags as a means of site promotion. I have been testing them on several site for a few months now and have found that they are worthless. While the tags might have some use from a usability standpoint, that is only the case if Technorati actually serves your pages on their site when one of YOUR visitors clicks on the tag. They have had many technical issues including inbound link tracking and now they are having issues serving up relevant results from tag clicks.

I ran seven tests on seven sites last month and more than half the time Technorati failed to show results from any of the sites. In fact they show an error message that states there are no pages from the blog about “search engine optimization”. It would almost be funny if you didn’t take into consideration the time wasted with Technorati widgets and plugins.

From an SEO standpoint I have seen 0 inbound links credited from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo. This is from seven sites that each have over a thousand inbound links from other sources. There were no other tangible benefits from Technorati tags from SEO or traffic. As far as the authority, the highest number I was able to achieve was 75 on a site that is in the top 125,000 in Alexa and has a 7 PR. The site gets over 1500 unique visitors a day and not 1 came from Technorati last month.

I have removed the simple tags plugin as well as the tags code from all the sites. The next test will be using the full features of WordPress tagging. I will keep you all informed on how that goes.

For now the conclusion is Technorati is a no go from all 3 standpoints:

• SEO – no benefits in search engine placement from Technorati Tags
• Usability – there is no benefit from having visitors leave your site and go to Technorati.
• Linking – I have seen no inbound link credit from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo.

My recommendation is to loose the Technorati widgets and not waste any time with specific plugins for their tags. I will still ping their system when my blogs are updated, but will no longer go out of my way to incorporate their stuff into my sites.

Managed Content Syndication Services

If you have a website or a blog by now you must know that it has to be promoted in one fashion or another. I have written a lot of posts about different ways in which to promote your sites in both search engines and RSS directories. I have been getting a lot of emails from people asking for an overview of website promotion. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I am going to talk about my company’s primary service and use that as a blueprint for those of you that do self promotion.

A lot of my peers have asked me why I give so much information away, particularly about marketing tactics and SEO. The fact is most of my readers are advanced users and would find this information either the way I have through trial and error, or by searching the Internet for it. SEO and Social Network Marketing, especially optimizing WordPress is a much covered subject. The clients that I have now and are on the lookout for, are companies that don’t have the personnel to execute a Web 2.0 marketing plan. Whether they lack the programmers or content writers, they just can’t put the time in to commit to Web 2.0. Make no mistake, if your business relies on the Internet, especially organic traffic, you must put in the time and resources to be successful.

Content Creation And Syndication

Assuming that you have either a website with a blog, or a blog system that serves as your site, the 2 primary things to work on is solid and optimized content, and syndication. I am working on several articles about WordPress optimization both from the writing side and from the server side. In fact I have been putting together a plugin package that will take your WordPress system to a new level. I know that not everyone uses WordPress so I am also creating a new real estate portal that will be using TypePad as well as another mortgage related portal that is using ModX as its content management system. I have a rather large real estate company as a client and have had unbelievable success with WordPress, but I do think it is wise to not put all my eggs in one basket. So as I work with these other systems I will post articles on the SEO progress of these other systems.

One last thing before I get started; all of the guides that have to do with WordPress are using standard SEO practices, so if you have a regular website you can take the tactics and easily apply them. The hardest part of Web 2.0 on a static site is RSS feeds. It is possible with either CaRP Evolution or even Feed For All to create dynamic news feeds from static pages. This will allow you to utilize feed and article planters as well as ping services and XML-RPC on a non-blog site. I have had a lot of skeptics that say XML-RPC on a static site is a waste of time, or too hard to implement and not worth the effort. I am running a major test series now on a high profile website. Next week will be the first post in a series of articles explaining XML-RPC and how to utilize it on static sites.

Get Found Now’s best selling service is the Managed Content Syndication Service. It basically is a Web 2.0 action plan for businesses with a static website. I have only done 2 jobs in the last 3 years for clients that had no web presence whatsoever, but I have done hundreds of upgrades and WordPress installs for businesses that have an existing site. The fact is we have had a great deal of success.

It all starts with a solid content plan that is based upon keyword research. By knowing my clients keywords, I can create URL’s and content that gives the website authority in the search engines for those keywords. It is all about authority. Your page must seem to be an authority on the keywords you are promoting. This is done by moderate keyword stuffing and link baiting the pages with inbound links that have those keywords in the anchor tags.

The key is to plan ahead in your content outline. On a static site I recommend bread crumb linking as the means to ferment deep link navigation, an essential part of SEO and usability. Read my article about Website Usability and Deep Link Navigation for more info. Once you have content the next goal is to get it out on the web.

RSS Syndication is the most powerful means for a website to reach the masses. Read this article if you want an Overview of RSS Syndication. By using RSS Syndication Services you can reach more readers than any other method of organic traffic acquisition. I use FeedBurner to manage all my feeds and have been beta testing FeedBurners RSS to Email service. While it isn’t as sexy as FeedBlitz, it is great to track all your subscribers at once rather than relying on separate analytics.

By taking standard SEO practices, providing original and optimized content, then submitting the site through syndication, Get Found Now has found a recipe for success in Internet Marketing. Our Managed Content Syndication Service is the heart of our social network marketing strategy.

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