SEO Tips & Advice | Social Media Strategies & News

OK, so now Social Media has really started to become “main stream” – businesses are starting to cotton onto the idea it’s best for them to get involved and get a presence on various platforms. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube seem to be the popular choices (makes sense due to the user bases).

But one new problem arises, and that’s most companies are being there just for the sake of being there. They see their competitors doing it – they hear about it on the news, but they are yet to discover exactly what to do.

Another massive blockade is the reams of red tape that larger businesses have surrounding internal and external processes. This makes the whole use of Social Media very tricky indeed, as it often slows down response times to customer queries and there appears to be a big fear factor with allowing employees to be the voice of the business.

That’s why I believe small businesses (even one man operations) have a massive advantage over their big rivals. Never before have they been able to compete as easily and for free. Whilst the big guys are worrying about what to say, tone of voice, how to respond – the little guy can do whatever they like and only have themselves to answer to. What an advantage!

I had the pleasure of meeting a guy who runs a coffee van in Soho London, and was really excited to learn he uses Twitter, and blogging to share with his customers his every day experiences.

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Well this week – I am in a great mood (you’ll find out why when you listen), so it was my pleasure to compile all the news for you this week. Although its now passed my preferred bed time, I didn’t want to be late with this!

This week saw two sites in particular dominate (one for SEO and one for Social Media) as they had some great content.

As per usual, the links to the full stories can be found below:

SEOMoz – Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

SEOMoz – A Natural Link Love Story

SEOMoz – 5 Ways To Turbo-Charge User Generated Content For SEO

SEOMoz – Whiteboard Friday – What Kind of Links Do You Need?

Search Engine Journal – Microsoft Bring Facebook Twitter Sharing to Bing Shopping Search

SEO Round Table – Google Maps Hijacking Getting Out of Control?

Search Engine Watch – Build Links with a Killer Sales Promotion

Inside Facebook – Some Facebook Page Fan Numbers Fluctuate After Changes to the Like Feature

Social Media Examiner – The Biggest Social Media Mistakes (a Jay Baer Interview)

Social Media Examiner – 5 Easy Ways to Drive Social Media Fans to Action

Social Media Examiner – Foursquare: Are You Checking Out the Hottest Social Media App?

Social Media Examiner – 3 Twitter Marketing Ideas That Avoid Marketing

All Facebook – Facebook Must Make “Instant Personalization” Opt-In Immediately

All Facebook – New FTC Complaint Filed Against Facebook

Mashable – 21 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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It seems that there is a lot of focus on Facebook’s recent advances with their announcement of their open graph and a lot of talk within the SEO industry has been going on in regard to how this will affect SEO as we know it.

SEOMoz did a White Board Friday video (below) explaining the main differences between the two. If you haven’t seen it already I suggest you do as it makes things clearer.

I can understand why people were reacting as if this is the end of SEO – I even thought it but not in the way others have.

For the immediate future Google should be scared of Facebook (they’ve publicly admitted it) Why? One word – Traffic. Google over the last year has started to lose significant amounts of traffic to Facebook. And this is worrying for them.

Another threat? More and more advertisers will promote on Facebook – sometimes instead of advertising on Google.  Stands to reason hey? Crazy number of users, highly target-able and so cheap compared to Adwords (at the moment).

Are they threatened for search? Not at the moment. People just don’t tend to use Facebook as a search engine yet. If they do – it’s heavily reliant on things being made popular.

Google wins in the search war – but they cannot rest on that. Once Facebook becomes a habit for people to use as a search engine (and if they get good results) this could prove a massive blow for Google’s market share.

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Before I dive into this week’s Podcast – I wanted to report back on a great day I spent with Deborah Micek exploring London whilst she was over for a Social Media conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see her talk on the Friday night, but did get to see the sites with her and get very wet in the English rain!

Deb took plenty of pictures, so I’ll see if I can ask for some and post them.

Now onto the news and well – another buy week in the world of SEO and Social Media with plenty to report on.

I didn’t realise but last week’s Podcast was not submitted to iTunes, so that has now been done and all accepted! Hoping to make this a popular podcast for everyone to enjoy.

Of course, let me know what you think – and what you would like to have included and I’ll see if I can accommodate This time I have included the links to the full stories, so for further information, please visit the links below.

Until next time, have a great week – and I’ll speak to you soon!

Stories mentioned:

SEOMoz – 30 SEO problems and the tools to solve them

Search Engine Land – How To Use E-mail To Benefit SEO

Search Engine Journal – 5 Types of Link Building

SEOMoz – Facebook’s Open Graph WON’T Replace Google

Inside Facebook – Facebook Now Testing Sending “Like” Window Stickers To Local Businesses

Social Media Examiner – 21 Creative Ways To Increase Your Facebook Fanbase

All Facebook – The Rise Of The Facebook Start Page

 SEO and Social Media News 2nd May 2010: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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OK – so you’ve got on Twitter, worked out what the hell it’s about and then thought “How on earth am I gonna get more followers?”

It’s true – it would be best to have an audience when it comes to Twitter – yes, you can just tweet to yourself as after all it is a micro blogging platform but in order to get the most out of Twitter, you need to get involved in the real time conversation.

One of the main things that grates me about the common answer to the above question is “Just follow more people and most will follow back” – ok great, so you can handle a million tweets flying at you 24/7/365? Are you interested in all those people? No? What a surprise.

Instead of thinking of ways to gain fake followers, you’d be best off following a few easy methods to gain followers who are actually interested in you.

Besides – seeing a Twitter profile with an unhealthy ratio of followers to followed just doesn’t look genuine. Are they really listening to all those people?

So – lets get onto 5 ways to increase your Twitter followers:

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Hey,

Super quick post that I’ve slapped together. This is a review on the book Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk which I have to say is awesome.

This is how quick I wanted to share with you my thoughts. My room is a mess, I used my in built web cam and the sound is a bit ropey – but hey, I wanted to give you an unscripted review a real true insight from the heart.

I have never read a book so quick, I couldn’t put it down and I know I will read it again soon too.

Anyway, check out the video below:

Oh, how about grabbing the FREE Chapter?

If you want more information and videos about the book, you really should check out the dedicated site: Crush It Book

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Have you read it yet? Let me know your thoughts!

Still not sure? Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll see what I can do

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Since viewing a lot of sites that have included their Facebook Fan Page box (well done guys – it really is a great move) I have noticed a bit of a pattern which I felt warranted a post.

This post wont be long (well it doesn’t need to be) but I thought it was an interesting point and one worth pointing out. If you have a Fan Page – you’d be silly not to include a Fan Box or a badge, or some form of promotion of it on your site.

After all, the more fans you get, the better chance you have of engaging with them in a way you may never have before. If you haven’t got a fan page – what can I say? Shame on you! If you’re interested in getting one set up – let me know!

OK, back to the point. Most times out of ten I’m logged into Facebook. It’s mainly idle but I’m logged in all the same. Now, if I’m surfing around on some of my favourite sites and they have a fan page installed, a VERY clever thing happens.

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This morning I got ready just like a normal Sunday and logged onto the laptop.

I opened up Tweetdeck and logged in. I’m then confronted by the news via Twitter and a few Facebook updates that Stephen Gately (from Boyzone) had suddenly passed away whilst on holiday in Majorca with his partner.

My thoughts and condolences go out to his friends and family.

Now, I’m not usually the one to use this type of news to create a blog post around it but this is the first time I’ve come across this type of thing whilst searching for a particular topic on Google.co.uk at least.

Now, the initial information I had was from someone I’m following on Twitter and that was “RIP Steven Gately”. Now, I naturally did a search to find out how this happened. First stop Google.

Why Google when I found out via Twitter? Well two reasons:

1. It’s still an automatic thing for me to use Google to search for stuff. I’m starting to utilise Twitter Search more but it’s still not my first port of call.
2. I wanted to get straight to the full story rather than snippets of what has/hadn’t happend, so I thought a search in Google is more likely to bring up sites such as the BBC.

There are a few ways I could have found out the information but I still chose the search engine rather than going direct to the BBC for instance. This could just be down to how I personally tend to navigate the internet, but with the advent of “live” search, it was worth noting the results I got from  the three main search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing. Please note, these results are all for the .co.uk versions and searched whilst in the UK. These searches were also conducted roughly an hour after the news broke (the first I was aware of it).

Google Results

OK, so lets start with Google. I went extremely broad for the search and went for “Stephen Gately” rather than any reference to his passing. This is the result I got:

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This post is actually earlier than expected, as I wanted to give more foundations to the what is Social Media? post I kicked off with but I thought I might as well hit this whilst it is fresh in my mind.

I’m feeling very passionate this morning, so there may well be swearing in this post. I’m not gonna apologise for that – I just wanted to warn you.

With Social Media being such a “hot topic” right now – it stands to reason you’re gonna get a few dodgy people out there trying to sell the new Snake Oil 2.0 so it pays to be vigilant.

I’m not gonna jump on the whole “guru” bashing that I’ve seen recently. To be honest, I feel that some of those posts that are attempting to bash Social Media Guru’s are smoke screens to say “well hey, I know what I’m talking about so use me instead”.

Look, there are people out there that get Social Media, use it with fantastic success and the main reason? Well, they don’t use it as a marketing channel – they are themselves, transparent, share their interests and passions and the bonus is they get people who wanna buy from them.
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Hey Everyone,

Hope you’re all well. Right, as you can see, I have started off this blog with the SEO side of things in mind, starting with the basics and the thought of progressing onto more techniques.

Now that I have a good amount of SEO content rolling, I thought I’d start to cover the Social Media side of things to build up this topic.

As with the first SEO post, I thought it would be an idea to outline what I believe Social Media to be. Now, these are my thoughts and opinions. In fairness I don’t think (within reason) there is particularly a right or wrong answer to what Social Media is, so feel free to put in the comments what you believe Social Media to be. I like to hear from you guys.

OK so what is Social Media? Well to be honest it’s just an umbrella term that covers the elements for people to communicate online. Web 2.0 plays a big part as without such an advancement of the internet technologies out there, we would still be using forums as our social media channel. After all, they were how a lot of like minded people originally came together.

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