Search Advisory

You probably didn’t know I was on vacation this past week because, through the magic of technology, my pre-written blog posts kept getting published even while I was away. But, boy…leave for five business days and my TechLINKS blog gets moved to

a new TAG Community site, and Microsoft and Yahoo finally agree on a deal! (What else did I miss?) Here’s how the latter may (or may not) affect you.

In a nutshell, Yahoo will no longer keep its own index/database for organic search results (this is the SEO — search engine optimization — side of the equation). Instead, it’ll “lease” this data from Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. The deal should close early next year and Bing results should show up when you search on Yahoo sometime third quarter 2010.

In addition, on the paid search (PPC – pay-per-click) side, Yahoo will “lease” the ads from Microsoft as well. That’s expected to happen by early 2011.

So is this going to rock your world? Not likely. I, for one, am glad to see Google getting some competition, although how much of a dent this alliance can put in Google’s market share — if any — remains to be seen.

If your site currently ranks high organically on Yahoo but not Bing, that’s not good, but you’ve got about a year to fix that. If you run PPC, things may simplify, as you won’t have to manage campaigns in both Yahoo and Microsoft. There are some proprietary Yahoo tools that may be going away, but unless you’re a developer, I don’t see a big loss for many folks with this new scenario.

The category of “microblogging” is dominated by Twitter, so that’s the site that I’m going to focus on.  Each tweet (Twitter “post” of 140 characters or less) does actually become its own unique web page.  You can see this by going to Google and typing this into the search box: site:http://twitter.com/yourname.  You’ll see one web page displayed for each tweet that you’ve posted.

However, this doesn’t mean that the very brief “content” you’ve posted will show up for any searches other than that very specific one.  Tweets are too short to fit many search terms in them, and there’s no reason for these “tweet pages” to have any links pointing at them.  So using Twitter to have more content show up in the search engine results pages won’t work, other than possibly your profile page.

Profile pages tend not to rank too highly, since there’s not a lot of room for search terms there either.  You can add links to your site in your profile, but you can’t put search terms in the link text, and there’s some debate over whether or not the links pass juice.

But there are indirect ways to use Twitter for link-building.  You can follow leaders in your industry, and also do searches for relevant conversations that are happening about your brand or vertical.  If an opportunity presents itself to reach out to these folks with quality content, you may get “retweets” to further spread the word, as well as links in tweets and, ideally, on other sites as well.

Last time, I wrote about the benefits of LinkedIn profiles for search engine optimization.  Today, I’ll cover other types of social networking profiles, including Facebook, Plaxo, MySpace and Google Profiles.

Facebook personal profiles: The default setting is to keep your profile private and just show a very small amount of information about you publicly.  This means there’s really no chance for your personal profile to appear in the search engine results pages (for any search terms other than your name, that is) or to build links.  If you don’t care whether or not the world can see your profile, you can change your privacy settings to change this.  But watch out for those college party pics!

Facebook business profiles: The default setting is to make business profiles public, which is presumably what you want.  This means using search terms in the “Company Overview” area (and other text) may help the profile rank high in search engine results for terms other than the company name.  You can link to your website, but you can’t put search terms in the link text, nor do the links pass much “link juice.”

Plaxo personal profiles: Like Facebook, the default setting is to display just a very limited public profile in the search engine results.  You can easily change this to display more, including text with search terms in it.  Normally, there’s less chance of “too personal” information being shared on Plaxo, since it’s so business-focused.  You can link to your website, but you can’t put search terms in the link text, nor do the links pass much “link juice.”

MySpace personal profiles: Fewer business people use MySpace, but profiles here do appear in the search engine results (so, again, beware of friends posting party pictures!).  You can link to your website, but you can’t put search terms in the link text, nor do the links pass any “link juice” (they’re redirected, not “nofollowed” like the links above).

Google profiles: This is a new feature launched by Google that helps you get found for your own name, which is handy when you have a common name like mine.  There’s another Stacy Williams who’s a model and actress that apparently appears occasionally sans clothing…so now it’s more likely that people meeting me for the first time will have a more realistic expectation and not be disappointed!  Google profiles are great because they definitely show up in Google’s results, you can put search terms in the link text, and the links do pass “link juice.”  So if you do nothing else based on today’s post, set up a personal Google profile!

Now that we’ve covered the most popular social networking sites, it’s time to move on to microblogging sites (the category dominated by Twitter).

Social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and MySpace, can help in your search engine optimization efforts because your profiles (personal and/or business) show up in search engine results and include links pointing to your corporate site that may boost its organic rankings.  LinkedIn offers the most bang for the proverbial buck, so we’ll cover that today and other social networking sites next time.

Nearly every professional has a profile on LinkedIn these days.  And these profiles rank high in the search engine results — run a search for your name, and unless you’ve got a very common name, your LinkedIn profile should be in the top 10.

More about your personal LinkedIn profile:

• Include search terms in the copy (in your summary, experience, etc.).
• You can include links to up to three websites.  After clicking on the ”Edit My Profile” tab, click on the “[Edit]” link to the right of the sites.  You’ll see a drop-down box that gives you options for what type of site this is (“My Website,” “My Blog,” etc.).  Choose the bottom option, “Other:”.  In the box immediately to the right of this, add the description of your site — with search terms in it!  Mine says “Search Engine Marketing Firm” and it’s a link pointing to the Prominent Placement website.
• To summarize benefits, this content will appear in the search engine results, you can control the link text, and the links do pass “link juice” along to your site.

More about your business LinkedIn profile:

• Include search terms in the copy (in the company description, etc.).
• You can include one link to your corporate website, but unfortunately, you can’t change the link text on business profiles.
• To summarize benefits, this content will appear in the search engine results and the links do pass “link juice,” but you can’t control the link text.

If you do nothing else, you should set up and optimize both types of LinkedIn profiles.  More on other social networking sites next time.

In addition using your own blog for SEO purposes, you can also leverage other people’s blogs.  Here, it’s not so much the content that helps (your comment on another blog is not likely to show up in search engine results), it’s the links.  And there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

First, find blogs that are in your industry or on a topic that’s relevant to your business.  (It won’t do a technology company much good to get a link from a blog about flowers, for example.)  Technorati or Google Blog Search can help you find appropriate blogs.

Next, become a reader of the best blogs.  If/when there’s a post where it’s appropriate for you to add a comment, do so.  Very important: I am not advocating blog spam!  Only add a comment if it makes sense to do so, and add a quality comment that furthers the discussion (nothing like just ”Great post!”).

In your comment (preferably the footer, under your name), include a link pointing back to your site.  Remember from my previous post, some blogs will be using “nofollow,” so links from those blogs won’t count for as much (if anything) as compared to links from blogs that aren’t using “nofollow.”

So that concludes our brief overview of how to use blogs to help reach SEO goals.  Next up: social networking sites!

Monday and Tuesday I’m giving presentations that you may find worthwhile.  Monday’s is an evening Meetup event about using social media for SEO that costs just $10.  Tuesday’s is a webinar you can watch from your desk at 2:00 about pulling more prospects into and through the sales funnel.  It’s free.  More info on both events:

Monday:

If you’ve been following my “Leveraging Social Media for SEO” series, you may be interested in attending a meetup event this Monday, July 20, from 6:45 – 9:00 pm.  I’ll be on a panel discussion talking about “Using Social Media for SEO” put on by the Atlanta Search Engine Optimization meetup group.  The cost is $10 and the location is the University of Phoenix off 400 in Dunwoody.

In addition to the “off-site” social media factors I’ve been discussing in this blog series (and will cover that evening), Peter Fasano of Mass+Logic will speak about ”on-site” social media factors, such as integrating links to social media sites on your site, pushing content out, and more.  There will also be a third speaker giving a case study, and plenty of time for Q&A.  Mike Schinkel heads up the organization and this meeting, with assistance from Jack Ogilvie and Eric Werner.

Tuesday:

I’m excited to be teaming up with two experts to give a webinar this Tuesday, July 21.  The topic is “Convince and Convert: How to Pull More Prospects Into and Through the Sales Funnel.”  I’ll be talking about underused and newer search engine marketing techniques to drive targeted prospects into the top of the sales funnel.

Then, demand generation expert Keith Finger will speak about how to nurture leads to shorten the sales cycle, and how to score leads to focus on the best opportunities.  Our session will be moderated by Glen Caruso, Director of Advertising Sales for Tremor Media and Immediate Past President of the Atlanta Chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Mark your calendar for Tuesday, July 21, 2:00 – 3:00 pm (EDT) for this free webinar.

If you’ve been following my “Leveraging Social Media for SEO” series, you may be interested in attending a meetup event next Monday, July 20, from 6:45 – 9:00 pm. I’ll be on a panel discussion talking about “Using Social Media for SEO” put on by th

e Atlanta Search Engine Optimization meetup group. The cost is $10 and the location is the University of Phoenix off 400 in Dunwoody.

In addition to the “off-site” social media factors I’ve been discussing in this blog series (and will cover that evening), Peter Fasano of Mass+Logic will speak about “on-site” social media factors, such as integrating links to social media sites on your site, pushing content out, and more. There will also be a third speaker giving a case study, and plenty of time for Q&A. Mike Schinkel heads up the organization and this meeting, with assistance from Jack Ogilvie and Eric Werner.

For those of you keeping track, that makes three opportunities in the next week where you can hear me speak about various search marketing topics, for free or very low cost. Here’s the rundown again:

Thursday, July 16 morning: “What the Future Holds: Marketing and Sales in the Year 2012” (group event, free to TAG members, $20 for non-members)

Monday, July 20 evening: “Using Social Media for SEO” Meetup (group event, $10)

Tuesday, July 21 afternoon: “Convince and Convert: How to Pull More Prospects Into and Through the Sales Funnel” webinar (online, free of charge)

I’ll be on a panel discussion about “What the Future Holds: Marketing and Sales in the Year 2012″ this Thursday, July 16 from 7:30 – 9:00 am at Georgia Tech’s Technology Square (Hodges Room – 75 5th St., Midtown Atlanta).  The event is hosted by the TAG Marketing society of the Technology Association of Georgia.  Our moderator will be PointClear‘s founder, Dan McDade.

Here’s the official writeup:

Join our distinguished panel as they discuss what the future of sales and marketing. Stacy Williams (search engine marketing pioneer), Tim Sullivan (Solution Selling® sales process and methodology expert) and Joe Kaufman (interactive marketing expert) will predict how marketing will change in the next three years as we approach 2012.

See what the future of marketing holds as our distinguished panel discusses what has changed since 2006 and what will change as we approach the year 2012. Topics to be discussed include an increased focus on tracking and measurement, “outside the nine-dots” use of twitter, real time search, mobile marketing, campaign integration, behavioral design and 1-to-1 marketing.

Yesterday’s post about leveraging your blog for SEO purposes focused on platform and domain issues.  Today, I’ll dive into optimizing the blog itself, as well as creating links to the corporate site that will help boost its rankings.

Optimizing Blog Content

As noted previously, it’s ideal for your blog’s content to rank high in the search engine results, alongside your corporate site.  So blog posts can (and often should) be optimized just like any other web page.  First, know which search term you’re targeting (that’s another topic entirely and I’ll cover that in a future series).  Second, where possible, work the term into the blog’s headline and copy.  Note that you’ve got to make the post readable by and appealing to your target audience, so don’t stuff an unrelated search term into it or sacrifice readability.

Ensure that each post will have its own “permalink” page — a standalone web page that may be listed in the search engines.  Most blog platforms’ default title tag for these pages is the post’s headline.  This can be a good thing, if you’re able to work the search term into the headline.  But sometimes that isn’t possible — you may want a short, snappy, attention-getting headline for the blog post, and it may not work to include the search term.  So consider downloading the WordPress plug-in “All in SEO Pack“, which will allow you to write a different title tag.  This way, you can include your search term in your title tag, even if it isn’t in your headline.

Links

Links from your blog to your corporate site can help the corporate site rank higher in the organic search engine results.  Search engines look at:

• The number of links pointing to the corporate site, and to particular pages on the site.  So, where it makes sense, include a link from a blog post to a page on the corporate site.  Don’t just link to the home page, but link to deeper pages as well.  Obviously, the link should be relevant to the post.  If your post is talking about a particular product you offer, link to that product page.
• The words in the anchor text (text of the link itself).  Fortunately, blogs are one place where you can dictate the words in the anchor text, and they should be search terms where possible.  So if your blog post about your CRM solution has a link pointing to the CRM product page on your corporate site…and if that page is optimized for the search term “CRM solution,” then that link should read something like “More information on our CRM solution.”  (Note that a link that says “Click here” is much less helpful for SEO purposes.)
• The quality of the links.  Links from “junk” sites don’t count for much, if anything.  Links from sites that themselves have a lot of inbound links count for more.  So links from your brand new blog that’s relatively unknown won’t be terrifically helpful at first.  But as your blog ages and gathers readers and generates links from other sites pointing to specific posts…the “link juice” it will pass to your corporate site will be worth more.  Chalk this up as yet one more reason you should publish quality content on your blog – to attract links to it.

Tip: Having writer’s block?  Look at a list of targeted search terms and that may spark ideas for that day’s post, which will, naturally, be optimized for that term!

Next, we’ll talk about how to leverage other people’s blogs for SEO purposes.

Blogs were social media before the term “social media” even existed.  And search engines love blogs — ironically, it’s often easier to get a blog ranked high in the search engine results pages than a regular website (that goes for most forms of social media).  So how can you leverage your corporate blog for more prominent placement in the search engines?

In terms of platform, it’s usually best not to host your blog on a site like Blogger or WordPress’ hosted solution*.  That’s because any links pointing to your blog will benefit Blogger and WordPress more than they’ll benefit your blog or your website.  You’ll get more out of your blog — and have more control — if you own the domain that it’s on and host it.  Which brings us to two options:

Having two domains (www.blog.com + www.site.com):

• Advantage #1:  You can take up more room in the search engine results pages — since each URL can have up to two organic rankings, you’ve just doubled the number of spots your company can take up.  If you get all four listings, you’ve just grabbed 40% of the organic results.
• Advantage #2:   The “link juice” from your blog to your corporate site usually “counts” for more since it’s an external link, not a link from one page of your site to another.
• Disadvantage:  The search engines tend not to trust new URLs, so it can take awhile for your blog to build enough links and history to rank high itself.

Having the blog as part of your main domain (either www.site.com/blog OR http://blog.site.com):

• Advantage #1:  Link juice from other sites will be consolidated — it’ll all go to your corporate site (including the blog), so every inbound link will benefit both parts of the site.
• Advantage #2:   The blog may rank higher faster, since it’ll be part of a website with a history instead of at a new URL.
• Disadvantage #1:  You can only have two organic listings, rather than four as described above.
• Disadvantage #2:  The link juice from the blog to the site usually won’t count as much, so using the blog to build links to the corporate site won’t be as effective.

I generally go with the first option.  If your goal is to take up real estate in the search engine results pages, and boost the corporate site’s rankings through links from the blog, that’s usually the best approach.  Tomorrow I’ll cover best practices for optimizing blog content and building in effective links to benefit the corporate site.

*Wordpress’ solution that allows you to host your own blog is what I recommend.  It’s the most search engine-friendly option available.