SEO Mentor

There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.

The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”

With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links, spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites. Here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:

• Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
• Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
• Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to

So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:

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With the influx of new Web 2.0 sites online there is a growing concern with businesses both online and offline and how to benefit from Social Networking and Media sites that are currently rocking the online world.

The president of the company I used to work for asked me the following,

“How can Social Media help my company and why should I waste time with it.”

I went through a couple examples of how social marketing would help his business grow and showed him a couple of sites that I thought he should check out like Facebook.com, Squidoo.com, Twitter.com, and Stumbleupon.com just to name a few. Once I said ‘Facebook’ his eyes lit up and he said how fun he has had on Facebook and how he has come across old friends that he hasn’t talked to for years. I then saw a light go on in his head realizing the power of Social Media and Social Networking sites.

A recent article called “Why is Social Media So Hard For Businesses?” by Mark Collier of SearchEngineGuide.com stated:

“More businesses than ever are exploring the possibility of using social media tools and sites to help grow their business. But many of these efforts aren’t very effective, and I think that is due to many businesses simply misunderstanding what social media is, and why it’s so important.

First, what exactly IS social media? Asking 10 people might result in 10 different answers, but for simplicity sake, lets say that social media is a group of tools and sites that let you easily create and share content online. Blogs, social networks, and podcasts are the common forms of social media that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with.

The problem that I think many businesses have, is how they view social media. I believe many businesses (of all sizes) see social media sites and tools as new channels to publish content into. In order words, they view social media as being marketing channels.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Notice in the above definition of social media, I said that these sites and tools are ways to create and share content. Why use the word ‘share’ instead of ‘publish’ or ‘distribute’?”

I totally agree with Mark and believe that not only businesses but in general people are misunderstanding the purpose of these social media sites that are now getting more pageviews than even the major search engines. Think of a search engine as a quick search for something and then leave. With these social media sites people are not only viewing more pages on the sites but they are also staying on these sites up to 5 times longer than they stay in the search engines, meaning you as a business owner now have five times as long to catch your viewers attention. THIS IS POWERFUL!!!

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So with all the buzz about Twitter and all the million blog posts done about this new Social Networking site, lo and behold another similar site pops up and is the talk of the web. So what is this new social site well it is Plurk.com and it is causing a storm. Some people have been calling it Twitter on meth, but you be the judge. Is Plurk just a Twitter Clone?

Social Media Mom, Kristen Munson talks about how she was , “At first I was a bit overwhelmed and did not see the attraction.” If you would like to see what others are saying about Plurk then check out all the recent posts at Sphinn.com and watch this video below from YouTube.com explaining what exactly Plurk is and how to use it:

Now that I am using Plurk I have found things that I really like and hate when comparing it to Twitter. First of all I really like the timeline concept that Plurk uses and I love the more visual effect it gives. I also like that you can divide friends into cliques. Some things I don’t like is that there is not a easy mobile updater like Twitter has although I have heard they are working on making the mobile “SMS” option easy and accessible.

So I will let you all decide what you think. For me I use it and like it for the most part. You can start following me at http://www.plurk.com/user/yourseomentor!

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So if you haven’t heard of Twitter.com yet then you must be living underneath a rock. Twitter whether you like it or not has been changing the online world and has created a lot of buzz. Everyone and their dogs are all on Twitter, so the question is “Are YOU?” If you want to learn a bit more about what Twitter is then check out what Wikipedia is saying about it.

So if you remember each month I will be posting my monthly SEO Cartoons, so here is this months cartoon about Twitterholics:

Guess what there is actually a website about Twitterholics at Twitterholic.com. CRAZY!

Here are a couple articles that you should take a look at about Twitter:

Are You Using Twitter Yet? - by Aaron Wall

Twitter: Is it really worth using? - by Neil Patel

Twitter Poll: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool? - by Lee Odden

Tweet Wars - check out this funny video

To see more posts about Twitter check out all Twitter article posts at Sphinn.com

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If you are not using FriendFeed you are missing out on a great tool that helps you add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and many more. Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing in one place, think of it as a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.

Here is what Crunchbase.com is saying about what FriendFeed is:

“FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites.

Other companies, such as Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand and the more recent Fuser, are trying to help you organize your online social identity as well, all in different ways.”

So I joined FriendFeed a while back and have found that it is another great tool that helps me keep up on what all my social friends are doing online one of those being Dave Harry of Huomah.com. Not only do I love to follow everything that Dave is talking about online (because it is usually entertaining and intellectual) but what I really wanted to let everyone know about was the public rooms he has created on FriendFeed:

• the SEM Room
• the Learn SEO Room
• the SphinnZone Room

Here are some other people that I follow on FriendFeed and really I try and follow them everywhere:

Ann Smarty
David Wallace
Kristen Munson – Social Media Mom
Danny Sullivan
Shana Albert – theNanny
Jason Calacanis
SpostareDuro – Kimberly Bock
Bill Slawski

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So I was doing some research on Facebook.com for some clients that I mentor for Social Marketing. Through my research I found the following articles below that helped me understand a little better what Facebook.com is really all about:

Facebook – Wikipedia

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while still a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students but was expanded to the Ivy League. The website has more than 69 million active users worldwide. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007.

Facebook – The Complete Biography

Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user …

Find Cheap Gas on Facebook

Then you should try the cheap gas application on facebook. The app simply takes your Zip Code that you have registered and automatically shows you the locations & prices for the cheapest gas. It breaks these down by regular unleaded and …

Facebook in Reality

To give you a sense of how ridiculous some aspects of Facebook are, idiotsofants.com have produced a video called Facebook in Reality. It is currently running at 460000 views and comes up first when you type Facebook into YouTube. …

Using Facebook for business (part 2): making it sustainable

If we’re not careful, we can end up with blogs that never have posts added, or Facebook pages that are little more than a few fan photos. This is why I spent a lot of time evaluating Facebook before getting our company into it. …

So if you were ever wanting to learn a little bit more about Facebook.com then I hope this quick post and resources helped.

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