SMO: Social Media Optimization

Community-built web sites, such as the Wikipedia, and other sites allowing content being shared through “tagging” can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic. This session looks at some social media services and strategies to tap into them in an appropriate manner.

Moderator:

• Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:

• Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Todd Malicoat:

A link baiting strategy:  Need to speak to people in a way talking one-on-one. Need a human voice to market with social media. Highly recommends reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. To succeed, one needs hooks. Such as the attack hook – tell people they are wrong.
Or the humor hook. Making jokes, putting a funny spin on industry. Speak on a human level. Title is very important in SMO. Copyblogger has 10 surefire formulas. Over promise and deliver, action words. Title keys. At least one keyword for good anchor text. Come up with 10 titles at minimum.

Content is really king. Focused, presentation is so important. Make sure it’s magazine good. Link out generally. Awards. People will see the link. Will be viral if scratch other people backs with links. Some linkbait will bomb.

Stretching relevancy. Some verticals can be difficult to come up with ideas. Need a new spin on old ideas to get eyeballs. Launch: Need a trusted account to work. Otherwise it will fall to bottom of barrell. Need to cram into 24 hour window. Have a friend submit account. Need to submit from other sites.

Do a little bid of old fashion link begging. Personalize every email. Create spreadsheet. Worse thing that can happen on Digg is the server crash. Cache your content. Hot images on alternate host. Results – 30 – 50 thousand visitors that are fairly worthless and quick. Hundred to several thousand backlinks. Lot’s of scrapers – so the anchor text with be the linking title. Goal is to get the high trusted links from high profile industry sites.

How long will it too beg for 1500 links? Not going to sell to the social media community. Not going to do well on Adsense. Establish flagship content – more RSS. Increased link pop and trust. Global link pop. Increased mindshare and readership.

Rand Fishkin:

Never spent one dollar to market SEOMoz. 100% has been social media marketing. Answers.com, NPR.org, AllBusiness.com are clients they work with in the social media space.

What is SMM (social media marketing)? Creating profiles on Web 2.0 style sites. Goal is to make friends and relationships on these sites. The demographic is not your customers. Need to target these linkerati as well. These groups don’t mesh well. Can’t sell to these people. Control and market your brand by participating in the conversation. Helps guide the business strategy. Reputation management – with social media – it’s the best way to control your brand. The algos favor the authority domains.

Playing in the space is great way to get brand out there. Makes a list of sites that are really valuable – see SEOMoz or my post from SMX Seattle. Stumbleupon is SEOMoz’s #1 refferer ahead of Google. StumbleUpon is really powerful. It’s a discovery engine. Wikipedia is a great place. Yahoo Answers – 3.5 million users. It’s a newbie industry. Digg, Yelp – a local business review site. Reddit – great place to do the linkbaiting game – more serious than digg. Linked is a great place for business networking. Flickr – great for social media – can expose image content that can be branded to many people. Flickr comments don’t have no follows. Delicious – has a new content session – so great exposure. Facebook and Myspace. Create corporate profiles and get link love from them. Musicians do it all the time. Craigslist – the forums and best of Craigslist is a great traffic driver. Amazon – leave comments. Authors can create profiles on the Amazon blog, nice link love. Technorati, Newsvine – serious and “newsy”. High quality traffic. Sphinn – our own version of Digg. Content is constantly changing. Great place to get more coverage in this industry. Citysearch – can rate and submit. Local business’s will charge $200. Helium – a new one. A great content site that ranks well. Wikihow – submit and edit articles similar to Wikipedia. Get’s great rankings. Second Life – the era of saying it’s the next big thing – a little dying. Coke spent alot of money with no ROI. Twitter can be useful. When people send message to Twittr can be effective for Digg spamming. Great way to meet up with friends and conferences.

Neil Patel:

Leveraging Digg and Stumbleupon. The audience – baby’s – 13 – college, some mid twenties. You need to appeal to those users. The audience is stupid. A lot of the Digg people are into science and tech. Hot stories get tons of traffics and links. Important factors – number of votes – to prevent spam – they changed the algos. Submitters – power users are much more effective. Friends – the more you have – the more chance you have to get to the homepage. Got banned from Netscape for having 25,000 friends on Netscape. Do not self promote. Don’t add biased info. Don’t pay for votes, Don’t break community rules, SPAM. If you get caught – will get banned. Tried an experiment – see post from SMX Seattle.

What to do: Add tons of friends on all networks. Participatei n the community. Before submit own content – help develop community before leverage it for yourself. Titles and description – again CopyBlogger. Become a top user – submit story from main stream media during the right times.
[tags]SES, Search Engine Strategies, SMO, Social Media Optimization, SEOMoz, Stuntdubl, Neil Patel[/tags]