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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Conference, Search Strategy, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.