Panel: Search Engine Optimization for New Media

I’m sitting here at the Thin Air Summit in Denver, anyone who is here on a Saturday is very serious about social media –I guess I fit the bill. I don’t know that much about SEO when it comes to social media, so I’m going to blog some of the key findings.

Moderator: Micah Baldwin
Panelists: Brett Borders, Elizabeth Yarnell, John Fischer

Elizabeth a book author had a desire to promote her book Glorious One-Pot Meals –without using a traditional publisher. Her advice? The goal is to be found, rather than focus on traditional marketing which is ‘target markets’.

Think beyond keywords and be actionable
Bad: “Elizabeth Yarnell, Author” instead use the title bar to put in keywords about your product, you’ll have better search results.
Better: “Learn to cook fast meals with Elizabeth Yarnell”, notice the call to action.

Existing social media sites score high
She suggests that social media sites (like flickr, myspace, blogger) already get lots of traffic, and page rank, and will increase your SEO ranking.

Social Media is about the abundance theory
It’s about giving away what you know and to share with others, in return they will come back to you.

Learn the keyword search tools on the internet, such as keyword tracker, google tracker, word tracker. Many are free, some are expensive.

Brett Borders provide some highlights of what SEOs are doing within social media, he doesn’t advocate these tactics.

Create video to dominate universal search results
Since Google launched ‘universal search’ (showing images, video, beyond just text) these are opportunities to score well on your search results. Create content in multiple mediums that all support your marketing effort. A snapshot of the video will show up on the universal search results.

Free Google Adwords
How to do free google adwords? Have you blog post create similar content pointing to the video, then submit to digg. It can ‘sometimes’ provide Google ads. (I really don’t get this)

Ego Searches influence your SERP –but not everyone else’s
If you do lots of ego searches for your own domains, Brett suggests that personalized search will actually cause your results to show higher –but that’s just what you see, not everyone else. You can go to your web history tools and have your history cleared which will prevent this from happening.

Persona Blogging (flogging)
Create a branded human character, as a facade, and ‘uplift’ the community, then link to your site every 25 times. There are agencies that are doing this. The risks? like the Edelman fiasco can get the ill will of your community and can result in brand backlash. These tactics will be found out in a few years.

Make Friends –make links
Create profiles in social networks such as tribe, then make a lot of friends which will send traffic back to your profile –which links to your website.

Follow folks on Twitter
A discussion talking about an automated way to gain followers on twitter, despite the limit of 2000, you can remove them then add more. These get more followers then you can spam them with tweets.

Link Tuning –and tone down adsl
Suggests that webmasters tune their page so not important pages have a ‘no-follow’ so Google doesn’t index it. Also he suggests that new blogs not be adsense heavy so it doesn’t look so commercial.

John Fischer runs a sticker company called Sticker Giants
Suggests that search engines don’t want marketers to focus on SEO, they just want you to do naturally link building.

Focus on business goals –not your personal name
After reviewing one of the attendee’s website suggested that her website content/titles focus on her business goals, not her given name. People will search on her business, not her name

Show off your media
On your blog, make it obvious and promote your social media content: youtube, flickr, ustream, seesmic, perhaps use a friendfeed widget, so readers know who you are.

Strategy perspective from moderator Micah Baldwin

Understand the difference between long and short term SEO strategies
There’s a long term and short term strategy. While there’s a lot of things you can do in the short term to generate traffic, it can result in you getting banned in the long term. The short term low value may build up long term value.

Be pervasive with a sticky post
Suggests creating a ‘sticky post’ that stays at the top of a blog and lists all the important information regardless of what you’ve posted recently. I think a header or footer could also help accomplish this

Summary
From the crowd, isn’t it better to be passionate about a topic and work on long term relevance? This way Google won’t discount your efforts in the long term.

The end suggestions were to be passionate about whatever you’re doing, it will help you to be relevant in the long term.

Me? I don’t do any specific SEO tactics in order to get search relevance, I just focus on writing content that people will link to, tweet it, and the rest happens by itself. I encourage you to avoid the short term tactics and focus on building the long term relationships –go for the long haul.

Picture 014Picture 025Picture 027Picture 029Picture 030Picture 032Picture 034Picture 036Oxygen is provided at the Thin Air Summit in DenverPicture 033Picture 016

28 Replies to “Panel: Search Engine Optimization for New Media”

  2. Hi Jeremiah – I don’t get this either…it’s not just you…:)

    “How to do free google adwords? Have you blog post create similar content pointing to the video, then submit to digg. It can ™sometimes™ provide Google ads. (I really don™t get this)”

  3. Sounds like a decent mix on the panel. I have studied the SEO side of social media for the past few years.

    The item I like to point out is that there is an aspect of social media where you know that you are A: talking directly to an audience, B: talking to a robotic search spyder, C: being syndicated to other audience by either A or B.

    There are not too many people that understand the differences between A,B,C- but it is a growing trend to see more connection points between them as the number heavy marketing types start looking at ROI.

  4. Amy, I’m just typing directly into wordpress and clicking save.

    David, yup, I’ll find out more tomorrow.

    It’s somewhat easy to figure out who’s what, wouldn’t you think?

  5. I came over to grab a link & got sucked into reading this. People & co’s that are using blogs to build SEO are wasting their time (I saw your tweet on it). I totally agree on focusing on the long term & building relationships. The SEO will follow. The title & first paragraph are the place to focus (readers appreciate it too!)

  6. I’m still utterly in awe of your ability to write these amazingly clean, articulate, non-rambling relevant posts in such a short amount of time.
    You, sir, rock.

  7. Jeremiah,

    Nice to meet you, finally!! Thanks so much for covering this session. My website is http://copybrighter.com/blog/ – The website you understandably linked to belongs to another marketing guy (of the exact same name) who also happens to look like me!

    ——-

    David,

    The tip about “Free Adwords” wasn’t literal.. it was was explaining how Digg submissions can be featured on the front page in Google, as part as “related blog posts,” even if they are not popular and they only get a handful of Diggs. If you Google, for instance, “social media marketing” – look down at the very bottom of the results and you’ll see a “related blog posts” section. This is called Google’s “universal search results.” Digg submissions with “Social Media Marketing” in the title can SOMETIMES show up in here, regardless of how few Diggs they have – along with popular and authoritative blog posts on the subject – on the front page of Google… (kind of like “free” AdWords).

    Bottom line: submitting your content to social sites can have side benefits… it can show up in unexpected places.

  10. Hi Jeremiah,

    Like Lucretia, I also am amazed at your ability to take so much information and synthesize in real time. It’s a real gift and you are clearly in the right role! My head was spinning at the end of the day after taking in lots of great material from the conference speakers. It was so nice to come home last night (I live 30 min from where the conference is being held), and read your summary of this last session.

    About thirty minutes into the session, I felt that the title really should have been something like “How Social Media is Supplanting SEO.” I agree with you and Micah’s point that passion and willingness to put that online to create a presence is the best way to be found.

  11. Jeremiah,

    I also liked Elizabeth’s point that the extent of your presence on social media indicates your passion for the topic. Your posts and tweets are clear evidence of that and are a great value-added even when I’m at the same conference! Looking forward to your keynote in a couple hours.

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  16. Hi Jeremiah,

    Excellent and well-organized post. Perfect reference piece as well.

    Let me clarify the point of these two comments:

    –“Create video to dominate universal search results
    Since Google launched ˜universal search™ (showing images, video, beyond just text) these are opportunities to score well on your search results. Create content in multiple mediums that all support your marketing effort. A snapshot of the video will show up on the universal search results.

    –Free Google Adwords
    How to do free google adwords? Have you blog post create similar content pointing to the video, then submit to digg. It can ™sometimes™ provide Google ads. (I really don™t get this)”

    By creating multiple media types and aligning them (using similar keywords in Titles and Descriptions; naming your media file the same across video, audio, image and news image; providing a link to your blog/website and to each of the other media elements in a given selection of media (let’s call it a Broadcast)…

    These best-practices present a unified front to search spiders. And a pre-sell experience to casual searchers and keyword-seeking individuals.

    Once you’ve distributed your media, then give those media assets some juice by visiting, pointing to them in your blog posts, and pinging them.

    All media is now social media. Leverage the two-way communication potential of this and you’ll achieve the coveted Universal Search Results. This is by far the most powerful visual placement on Google’s front page.

    Let me know if you need more clarification. We’ve developed a platform to make this process easy and fairly seamless at http://www.RichContent.tv.

    Universal search is truly a remarkable addition to a rich-media search experience. It also presents a powerful solution for social media folks to gain traction via search.

    Thanks again, Jeremiah.
    best,
    Mark Alan Effinger

  18. I enjoyed reading your post; I am running a small website on video conferencing I am a beginner in this business. I don™t know much about it but I am searching around for material that can increase my knowledge

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  25. Great Post, Building Relations for Search Engine Optimisation Links is key in my honest opinion. Articles, Blog Comments, Forum Comments are less valuable and pretty much worthless these days.

  26. Great Post, Building Relations for Search Engine Optimisation Links is key in my honest opinion. Articles, Blog Comments, Forum Comments are less valuable and pretty much worthless these days.

  27. Wow this™s Unique post looking nice & attractive. I like this? post. You have AN INCREDIBLE style of presenting good quality of post. Thank you very much for providing us such a good information through your post.

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