Social Media Optimization

what for Social Media Optimization

Last time, I downloaded white paper for increasing your blog or web site, related to search engine optimization or seo problem.

Source: Ektron, Inc. 542 Amherst Street
Nashua, NH 03063 USA


White Paper

Even with good metadata, it still comes down to content

Search engine ranking has always been about how well you can optimize your pages and how many links are directing people to your site (backlinks). Companies need to have good meta tags in place, and also have human (and search engine) readable URLs, siloed folder structures, and keywords and phrases on their Web pages in order to have a search engine-friendly site. The backlinks are important too; the more inbound links you get from other Web sites, the higher your site will rank. The search engines count backlinks into a Web site as a major part of their ranking algorithms. But these are technical considerations and they can be manipulated.

Ultimately, the reason people come to your Web site (and what keeps them coming back) is the content on it. Good content is the foundation for organic SEO; you want your Web site to establish you as a trusted expert. The information needs to be pertinent and timely. It has to be readable and factual and relevant to your audience. The readability is more than good writing; the grammar and spelling need to be there as well.

But what does this mean for SEO? It all comes back to the backlinks. A good public relations team can grow your incoming links as the word gets out through traditional channels (articles, press release postings, announcements) about your offerings, innovations, successes and other news. Good content will give your visitors a reason to do the same thing and recognize your Web site as a true authority site. This is what Google (and other search engines) want to display in their search engine results: the most important sites to an internet searcher. Now, Google has a way to measure this with social media.

The most important sites to an internet searcher

The participation of internet users in forums, blogs, commenting, rating, posting, and more is growing and it is getting easier and easier to join in the conversation. Facebook and Twitter make it easy to let “friends” and “followers” know what users think is important. StumbleUpon, Furl and Digg do the same thing and rank the value (and the importance) of those sites by the number of people who tag it. Mobile devices are letting people participate away from their computers. But with traditional SEO, no real attention is paid to what internet users think. Inbound links can be artiicially inlated. Links can be bought and sold; Web site linking networks have been created to build links like this. This is against Google’s best practices and with the emergence of social networking, Google has a way to combat this and really get a feel for the true authority sites, or what sites real people think are important. Because of this, Google is changing the way that they count links coming into Web sites. With the help of social media and social networks, Google is getting better at being able to tell the difference between real, quality links and the fabricated links. They are now able to discount any inbound links that have been acquired through questionable or artiicial means and give added weight to links coming from social channels. Social media optimization is about building a community of readers who trust you and who trust each other.

Social Proof
Traditional optimization is still important, but on the social Web you have to focus on raising community awareness about your business, letting links happen naturally. It’s a sort of “trust building” that is part of social proof. Social proof is the phenomenon of trusting the opinion or action of a group and participating based on the group, and not necessarily on the subject (or in this case, the Web site) itself.

Building social proof will increase your presence in community settings and getting People, if they better ‘social ranking’ will directly affect how the search engines rank you in their are interested results. There are some indicators that will help generate trust in your site and your company. Product testimonials, whether they are on or off your Web site, are in the subject, essential and you can use forums and commenting to encourage them on your site. The classic “read what our customers have to say about us” is extremely effective. Likewise, recommendations from experts present the trust of an authority igure and visible postings of awards add to your social proof and grow your social visibility.

SEO is changing as search engines change the way they look for trusted authority site because
sites. Google (and others) are looking to the public to deine trusted sources. Once you become a trusted source for the search engine, you will be recognized as an authority site by an even larger audience, which will, in turn, further feed your high other people placement in search engine returns. You will grow your social network visibility and importance in the eyes of the social the Web site. Web, which will give you more social proof and grow your backlinks organically.

Steps to social media optimization

The irst step in the social media optimization (SMO) process is to make sure your main Web site can easily be ‘hooked up’ to social communities through RSS feeds, comments, blogs or forums. It needs to be a dynamic Web site (or page/forum/blog/section of your Web site) where updates can be frequent and interaction can be encouraged. Of course, all of the traditional ‘on-page’ SEO factors must be in place as well. Timely and quality content needs to be added regularly. The content needs to be information that your target audience will want to talk about and share. It needs to be educational, thought provoking, personal, funny or controversial. In essence, it needs to be anything that will get people in your market talking. The content can be anything: white papers, blogs, audio, video, photographs. It all depends on what form(s) of social network you belong to. Because your Web site is ready to be integrated into social communities through RSS, bookmarks, links, feeds and comments, your readers will easily be able to share your content with others in the community or, better yet, in other communities. These readers and communities wil be your natural link builders, increasing your search engine rankings organically. With SMO, you need to ind the communities that relate to your business and focus on getting quality content to your readers and the people in these communities. The better the content, the more it will be shared and the more ‘natural’ backlinks you will get. Ultimately, this leads to better search engine results. This is a long
term, powerful strategy.

Even though the initial idea and ultimate goal is to build a base and develop content for your community of readers for better search engine placement, you gain on another front as well. As your quality community content is shared, you are gaining more readers and may enter other communities that you have not heard or thought of. When you have established yourself as an authority in your ield, all you need to do is focus on your brand and the content and you will be able to reach all of your readers and beyond.

Tools for traditional and social Web SEO

Ektron CMS400.NET is built with your SEO strategy in mind and it gives you all of The tools you need to implement both traditional and social media-focused efforts. After all, the core of the content management platform is about giving users and subject matter experts control over content creation and deployment. This is critical to the success of SEO strategies on the social Web, making sure that the right people are putting good content to use.

In addition to giving subject matter experts the ability to create content that they know about (and thus ensuring that timely and relevant content is available to your readers), CMS400.NET also gives them the ability to meta tag the content. Harnessing their knowledge is key, and these experts will be your team members who are best suited for adding titles, summaries and descriptions to their content. Content authors are also able to add keywords and tags, and you are able to predeine metadata that gets applied to every page to ensure that your organization is getting the coverage that best suits your digital marketing strategy.

CMS400.NET’s approval process can also play a role in exectuing your digital marketing strategy as effectively as possible. It enables you to guarantee that best practices for metadata are in place and also double check content before it goes live on your Web site. While this may not always be necessary, it does allow you to make sure that your whole team is maintaining a consistent and effective SEO effort for your site.

The URL aliasing engine lets you present human readable page addresses to both organic search engines and your human readers. The aliasing allows you to manually create aliases (extremely useful for marketing campaigns) and also auto-generate relevant aliases based on Ektron’s taxonomy and/or folder structure. Your folder structure and taxonomy both have real meaning, having been structured to provide intuitive navigation around your Web site. With CMS400.NET’s aliasing capabilities, that intuitive scheme can also improve the way that search engines (and potential site visitors) ind you on the Web. These human readable aliases will also play a big role in optimizing your Web presence for social networks: people are more likely to follow a backlink that they can read and recognize. It has real meaning to them.

To give you a real-time look at your SEO and the traditional efforts you are making, CMS400.NET includes an SEO page analysis tool that gives you “real-time” access to the key information that you need in order to maximize your returns in organic Web searches. This SEO tool analyzes the pages of your Web site for W3C compliance, what information Google has about the page, Alexa rankings, image alt text, keyword density and metadata. The tool lets you know how (and if) you’ve set these values. Title, description, H1 tags and keywords are identiied with this tool and CMS400. NET makes it easy for you to supply this information as metadata or through the editor. If you do not, the search engine will determine on its own what the page is about. As a best practice, you should deine this information yourself. A Google analysis displays the information that search engines have about your page, including pages that link to it, indexed pages on the site and what the page looks like on a mobile device. The W3C checker validates the Web page for markup and CSS compliance, and also checks for broken links and the ability of the page to be displayed on mobile devices. By having correct markup that conforms to HTML or XHTML standards, search engines will detect words and phrases correctly, a key element in SEO. Correct semantic markup also ensures that search engine spiders can easily understand the content and navigation on the page. Proper HTML and CSS will make it easier for spiders to parse as expected and digest the content for organic search engines. The SEO analysis tool also reveals Alexa rankings. It links you to the Alexa overview for your page, trafic details and shows related and linked sites. To ensure SEO and compliance, all images that are used on your pages should contain alt tags. This enables searching of the images (since engines cannot read the contents of an image). In addition, alt tags must be used for 508 compliance. This tool identiies all images and their alt tags.

A keyword density analysis report for the page displays text graphically in much the same way that organic search engines see your page. Web pages that are content rich typically yield higher search engine rankings than pages that are mainly images or multimedia based. This report displays words, two-word phrases and three-word phrases in a cloud format, revealing the words and phrases that show up most often on the page. With this information, you and your content authors can make sure that the Web site’s content is optimized to include the search words and phrases that your target audience is using.

All of this will help you ensure that your traditional SEO tools are in place and that everything is optimized for your best placement in rankings. While you have less direct control over what happens to create backlinks from the social web, CMS400.NET has all of the tools that you need to encourage your readers to tell other audiences about you. Server Controls let you easily add RSS feeds and Web alerts to your site to proactively draw people back to your Web site again and again. The Social Bar control adds a critical functionality to your Web site: it places a button that lets people submit the site directly to popular social bookmarking Web sites like Digg, Facebook, Furl and others. Because of its simplicity, readers will bookmark your site when they ind something that they feel is relevant and of interest to others.

Web 2.0 tools from CMS400.NET encourage an active site. Blogging (both by your organization and readers), commenting, content rating and survey tools can be added to your Web site with minimal effort. Any of these tools can be used to supplement your SMO strategy by giving your readers the ability and additional reasons to return to the site. A well-placed comment can generate a lot of buzz and backlinks from social media sites, and a well-publicized survey or contest can promote your Web site to audiences you have not thought of yet.

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