Day 16 - Where SEO and Social Media Meet (?)

(Secret Sauce - part 2)

Practically, SEO and Social Media don't meet. SEO had to change in order to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

Welcome to the second day of our Secret Sauce sub-series. We will have probably 8-10 in this series of just telling you the somewhat revolutionary, but very definitely effective ways of getting your content to rank well so you can then potentially earn extra income online - enough for your goals anyway...

Practically, if you look at it, this whole site and Online Sunshine Plan book is revolutionary. Even though it's old school.

The more interesting point to me is that the more I study this stuff up, the more I've found that it's been out there for awhile and what I considered something a trade secret, has already been promoted on several sites.

What keeps people from seeing these (myself included) is their own self-built blinders.

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OK, from our last lesson, we covered that social media can be boiled down into 3 categories. These are from their function, not their communities or content-type. And we are naming these in order to simply make sense of how to earn income online by getting and keeping top rankings in the search engines.

Social Media Types: 

1. Bookmarking
2. Status Updates
3. Networking

This doesn't cover everything, but it covers what we need to know. (If you want to spend days and months covering this material, you can - I have, and it doesn't necessarily increase your income, although you are well-entertained.)

Your first steps are, just to recap:

• Find your own purpose
• Find the community which bests matches it
• Study that community to find out what solutions you can provide to their problems
• Create content to offer the service(s) or product(s) which will best help them (and you).
• Optimize your content so the search engines can make best use of that content and rank it well.

But a funny thing happens at this point. You'll see it if you use Market Samurai to dig into who is actually on top. You'll find that some of these sites have no real reason for being there. They don't have as many backlinks as the people they beat out, and also they aren't necessarily optimized for search engines as well as others.

What we've covered so far is really "old school" and based on very traditional models. And if you SEO your main site properly, you will eventually wind up in one of the top 5 spots and stay there. But that's just on-site SEO, mainly.

What will happen if you don't continue to add fresh, optimized content to your site is that it will drift lower. If more people find your site and backlink to it, then it will come up some. But Google and others bring in fresh content and float it at the top of their rankings to see how people like it. Good performing sites stick around. (Even though Google's second test is to then drop it like a rock to see if people still find it useful - if they do, it slowly rises again.)

But that doesn't explain all the weird things you can find happening on the rankings.

Social media does start to explain these.

Search engines were caught unaware when the flood of social media sites started up. And then these sites matured and started their own internal search functions, which then took traffic away from Google and the others. So now they are playing catch up (and have been for years).

In and among the 200-some factors Google uses to figure out how a site has "authority", they throw in some social factors as well. Not just popularity, but the amount of people who recommend (thumbs up, like, plus-1, leave comments, etc.) any site shows how people trust it. And trust shows valuable information.

(A scam scene I knew had to finally give up and accept the fact that forums exposing their scam were going to rank right along with them, regardless how many people they paid to remove their negative comments or take down their sites. Before, they owned the top 10 or so spots so could point to these as how great they were...)

Bookmarking

Search engine spammers (and others) first tried to understand bookmark collections as ways to get backlinks. Yahoo, in fact, was built originally on huge collections of bookmarks by several college students - who started a company based on having access to those bookmark collections.

Unfortunately, they didn't work that way. (Yes, I was one of those deluded "others".) Studying the effect of bookmarks was mystifying. You could get tons of bookmarks created for your site, but they all wouldn't show up on the search engines as backlinks. And the more popular bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, etc.) tended to not show up as well. But bookmarking did make the targeted sites improve in rank.

Bookmarking is an indicator of value and trust. And if you simply bookmark your own sites and have a few friends bookmark them, it still doesn't mean as much as a site where lots of people bookmarked it.

The other problem with bookmarks is that they aren't created by everyone on the Internet. So while they were wildly effective for raising rank a few years ago, they are more or less just an additive today (even if still a very potent additive.)

Status Updates

Twitter isn't the only rodeo out there. If you want a great overview of how prolifically these have spread, check out http://knowem.com - which deals ostensibly in "branding" by helping people to grab social media real estate for their name on the web. If you dig into their back pages, they have sorted out social media into several different categories. Status updates is huge (as are many others). But do a search from the front page and you'll have their list of key ones. You'll see some of every type, but status updates are present - and are also part of several of these, no matter how they are categorized. (Myspace, Facebook, and Google+ are all built on this, regardless of what else you can share.)

It was simply noted by Google that these status updates also showed what content people found interesting and trustworthy. So they are another factor. And while you can search for these, they don't particularly show up in Google for main sites - as they are transitory.

Networking

We are going to approach this from blogging. Every "free" blog out there is part of some community, whether they participate in them much or not. These free blogs make their money from included ads, and so promote the various new content so they can keep viewers interested and entertained.

The search engines know this, and keep tight tabs on them to find new and fresh content they can rank.

A lot of people say Facebook, LinkedIn and some others are networking social media. And it's true that they were formed to facilitate networking functions which people normally have. But both of those IPO's also shoot themselves in the foot regularly. Main point is that they don't provide content, or keep making it hard to add good, fresh stuff. Their main use, really, is in status updates. (Facebook even deletes anything older than 30 days, and doesn't like Google searching what it has.)

Our use in defining Networking sites from a blogging view is to give it some relevance from a content approach. Obviously, a site which doesn't like Google won't have much content ranking well, and so won't get the click-through's found in organic search results.

Sidebar:

Facebook is called a "walled garden" for good reason. And while you can work to involve people in your "brand"  and several people sell various ways to use chat and other means in order to get leads - it's incredibly time-consuming. The most effective strategy I've found is to concentrate on content and always link your content into Facebook, but as an invitation to leave. If you look up my profile there, you'll find that I don't stick around much - but I do post regularly, on a via. Most of my stuff is posted first to Google+ (which we'll cover later.)

This book and site follows the principle that the Internet was built on freely accessible content. And the observed response that search engines reward fresh, original content which is regularly provided.

The pragmatic workouts follow this, and say that your best approach is to simply optimize your content for the search engines to get the best ranking and click-throughs.

So our over-arching approach in all of this is to follow what the search engines observe about their users, and duplicate so we can help them understand our content best - and so get the best ranking possible.

By creating blogs, you will be contributing to the search engines finding your material and being able to rank your stuff well. And then you only have to have some way to convert viewers to leads and leads to clients. (Like that is "all" you have to do. Well, I didn't say this was easy, only that I could explain it simply...) ;)

Summary:

While I've covered a great deal in a short space today, we've still gone on longer than is wise. You are going to be using (or at least studying about) these three types of social media in order to further your search engine optimization and both attain and preserve high rankings and volume click-through's.

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Freebies and study assignment:

Social Networking Exposed! makes more sense if you don't take it too seriously. This PDF does give you another viewpoint than what I've said. The key point is to give you a good overview of how to set up social media, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Note that the date of this shows how much social media has already changed in just a few years.

WAHM Masters Course - another great book from SBI! for work-at-home-mons will give you a lot more options about how to build your business. But I'm also giving this to you now in order for you to get a thorough overview of how to build a business to earn income online. It's not all that social, but does build on their concept of having an Information Site which pre-sells the viewer into becoming a lead (and later, client).

Day 15 - Secret Sauce and Social Media

So finally begins the Secret Sauce section. The "secrets" (all readily available if you know where to look) are those which have really quick SEO results and what's driven the creation of this series. This is also where it all gets exciting.

What we are covering today is the last section of The Online Sunshine Plan book, where the social media are explored.

But only partially. So this will start bringing you up to date on practical applications.

Social media is a catch-phrase for sites which people don't much understand. They operate more on word-of-mouth than anything else. And are taken to just mean "popularity contest".

Better is to think of them as a modernized "good old boy network". The word Network is key here. It's who you know and who you follow (trust) and who follows (trusts) you.

These sites mainly survive by selling advertising, which is mostly ignored by their users. However, there are enough click-through's in general to support those businesses who are addicted enough to buying advertising that they won't really check their bottom line. (It's a government-sponsored activity, BTW - tax credits for spending in this area abound.)

And those social media which can't get people to click-through on advertising ultimately implode due to lack of support.

Many of the older social media sites have moved to a different model, or were bought up by a larger corporation as a loss-leader (or like Google's Blogger and YouTube, are used to aggregate information about viewer habits - so they can sell more advertising)

The (False) Legends of Backlinking

Why social media is important these days is that Google is monitoring social media in order to see what people consider is valuable. So they can deliver the most appropriate content in their searches.

Spammers follow Google, and have jumped into social media to get their product in the top rankings. (Since the top five get about 85% of the clicks.)

And so the game continues, as Google then changes values for these. Search Engine Whack-a-Mole.

Most SEO guru's out there don't really get social media. They will tell you what you need to do is to get a lot of high-quality backlinks to your site. And they're stuck on this concept to the point where there have been some major "Google slaps" (devaluations) where some foolhardy entrepreneurs have cobbled together sets of "older" domains and addresses which they then allow people to link back to under the guise of "social media" - which is so apparently worthless that Google catches on to their game, then overnight devalues all the rankings based on those artificial creations. (Hope they invested their fast profits in real estate..)

We've covered this before. Google follows the people it services. If you are consistently producing fresh, high-quality content that is useful and considered valuable - then Google will reward you with high-rankings.

If you are after high-rankings just so you can get click-through's to your site and hopefully convert that traffic to sales - Google is going to sooner or later send your pages down to plus-100 rankings, if not outright eliminate you from their rankings completely.

Social media isn't for backlinks, although these sometimes happen. However, Google and others use it for analyzing whether other people think your content is any good - to determine its relative value compared to other material out there.

Social media means Community

And that is the basic approach which starts making sense of this scene.

We've covered community. It's what creates business models. People have a need or want and someone recognizes this, and creates a solution which people are willing to exchange something valuable for. And until someone does, there will be all this talk and whining and so on about the problem area.

This has given rise to forums, wiki's, blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook and anything that has "groups" in it.

Another need is to be able to share what you are doing, pictures of your kids and pets, and really stupid moves and all sorts of things. And this is served by Facebook and a few other sites, where you can find all about the details of their dog's diet (both ends - TMI) and who said what to whom. This is the old backyard gossip fence or neighborhood barbecue, converted to Internet versions.

The general advice I've encountered on this (and I wasted enough time in these social media sites to generally prove their consensus as workable...) - is that you pick only 2 or 3 good communities to do all your interacting with. This is where you keep your ear to the ground to find out what you need to know in order to deliver what people consider valuable. There are as many communities out there as there are scratches to itch. And more are splitting off and joining with each other every day. So you find our niche and you'll find a community there (or one will form around you pretty quick.)

And corporations have found that when they have people who simply park on Twitter and their Facebook page to deal with upsets their customers have, they can turn bad PR scenes over faulty products or service situations into a "hero riding out of the dawn to save the day" scene.

All this fiction about corporate "branding" is just that. And is why Facebook and most social media never convert in terms of "Return on Investment". Businesses already have communities around their product - they just have to join in on the conversation which they are already part of.  But buying ads in these areas is really just paying for someone to run an online service for them to help the community.

When General Motors and others pull their ads because they don't see any return in terms of improved customer consumption - they simply don't get it. Ford has a single person who is engaged all the time in just taking the pulse of various communities which Ford services with their products. Name is Scott Monty. Great guy. Look him up and follow him. He's figured this stuff out, even if Ford still hasn't. But they are closer than the other car manufacturers internationally (IMHO.) But that discussion takes us away from where we want to keep focused on...

3 types of social media

• Bookmarking
• Status Updates
• Networking

Others may disagree, saying that social media can also be categorized by type of content and how its shared. True enough.

Our focus has come in through creative content and SEO in order to figure out how to earn extra income online. So through that tunnel-vision, we can see that all these other forms of content are just that - and we can publish our vision and inspiration a thousand different ways through the Internet. But it won't change the fact that the top five spots on Google will always get the lion's share of clicks. Even the fact that Google is now tracking and presenting more than a half-dozen different ways people can produce and share their content.

And while I can (and will) continue with more of this explanation, it next goes into how to apply it.

So we'll leave you today with more freebies so you can start figuring this out on your own, testing what I say above (and as always) before/if you adopt it for your own use.

(These freebies are also your assignment today - yes, it's way more reading than you even had to do in college. But that's the way it is on this site - a data dump.)

1. This online course from SiteBuildIt! is ostensibly about writing, but says a lot about what we are talking about here. Cherry-pick it and then come back to study it thoroughly. NetwritingMasters.pdf

2. Brian Solis has been writing about the online world for years, with a few bestselling books. This is a simple article of his: Redefining the Echo Chamber.

3. As much as I recommend Marketing Samurai, there is also the fact that they deal in a great deal of education, even if its around their own product for examples. Market Samurai BlackBook.pdf

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OK, now I've pushed you over the edge. Absorb what you can. It might or might not get easier in the next few days. Because I only want to do this once, and get it as right as I can - since my next project takes me into territory which I won't have any reason to come back and refine this. So I trust you to help me make sure we build this bridge correctly so that not only you, but all you help can make this transition simply and safely as well.

Until tomorrow...