Archive for SEO
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Building Social Capital via Online Social Networks
The Facebook Era
I just finished reading a book called “the Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks, to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” by Clara Shih. Shih works for salesforce.com, so if you can get past her slobbing over how great of a product her employer offers, she does do a pretty good job of painting the landscape of social networks and who they appeal to. She then offers up valuable insight into the future of the online social graph and how to use it to grow and manage your online presence. As someone who has been on Facebook and Twitter and who works with younger, technology savvy students on a daily basis, this was a good exercise for me to supplement what I already sort of figured out on my own and also provide some new perspective on the value of what I have already been doing.
The book inspired me a bit so I will write a series of articles on some of the topics I found most interesting. I don’t want to make any promises so I’m not going to say how many articles will be in the series, but in this first blog I am going to talk a little bit about Social Capital.
Every individual has an inherent immeasurable social value or capital. This can be divided into two types of capital: Human capital, including talent, charm, charisma, and other personality traits that may be valuable to our success, and social capital, which is basically the value of our relationships. According to Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, “social capital can be measured by the level of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals, and is an essential component to building and maintaining democracy.”
One of my good friends who we will call “Neighbor Joe” works in a ticket office at a major venue in a big city. Over the years, Joe has acquired a great deal of social capital by building relationships with other colleagues in his industry. Joe can get free hockey tickets to just about any game he wants through his job. He likes hockey, but he’s not a die hard fan. He is, however, a big music fan so he uses his social capital to barter and trade his tickets for tickets to concerts at the different venues around the city. He also might give free hockey tickets to a bartender friend and receive free drinks at a bar some time.
Joe has a strong network of closely nit interpersonal ties. He fosters these relationships by offering free tickets and trades with his friends. He uses his social capital to obtain free tickets and builds it by offering tickets for free. No matter what though, the people he is trading with; friends, co-workers, family, neighbors, will continue to be his friends, whether he provides the tickets or not.
We all also have an extended network of relationships known as weak interpersonal ties. These are more casual acquaintances; perhaps people you knew from high school, someone you met at a conference, or a friend of a friend. Nobody has the capacity to remember everything there is to know about every weak tie relationship they have, nor the prescience to know which ones might become valuable in the future.
In mathematical sociology, these strong and weak interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information. (1)
In Joe’s case, a weak interpersonal tie might be my sister, whom he met at my wedding. My sister lives in Chicago and Joe is interested in going to Lollapalooza, which is a large concert held in Chicago. If Joe were Facebook friends with my sister, he would know where she lives, and he might ask her on advice on where to stay, what to do when not at the concert, and perhaps where to eat. My sister might find it odd to get a random phone call from a person she does not know. Through Facebook, however, she can instantly match a face to a name, immediately recognize how she knows Joe, and Joe can communicate using a low risk, less intrusive manner.
Social Network Analysis has been around in some capacity since the late 1800’s so the concepts of the importance of fostering and maintaining weak tie relationships is nothing new. Thanks to online social networks that sort of specialize in weak tie relationships such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, it has become socially acceptable to maintain those fringe weak tie relationships that we may not have had the capacity to maintain in the past. As Chah states: “By reducing the cost of interaction and the cost of maintaining a relationship, sites like Facebook and LinkedIn help increase our network capacity to include otherwise-forgone fringe relationships.”
So what does social capital have to do with small business? Ah hah! This is where I drop the hook, line, and sinker to get you to read my next article! Think about the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) aspect of a social network. Websites such as Facebook offer a low risk, low cost CRM solution. I used to send Holiday cards to my clients in December. Now if I befriend my clients on Facebook, I may know if a Christmas or Hanukkah is more appropriate. I now know when my client’s birthday’s are, their marital status, and how many children they have. I have a horrible memory so this kind of info comes in handy. When I see a client I can say, “So how is Joan and the kids? Johnny should be driving a car soon, no?” instead of “So how are the wife and kids?”
There are many ways to increase social capital using online social networks. Becoming a fan of a business on Facebook acts as free passive word of mouth advertising for that business. Online social networks can also be used as recruiting vehicles. Just having information about your business in your personal profile along with having a large group of weak interpersonal ties increases your social capital because you don’t have to shove your business down people’s throats for them to be aware of what you do. If you constantly provide status updates, actively participate in groups, and/or write blog entries (wow, look what I’m doing), these updates appear to everyone in your network, as a constant passive reminder of what your business is about.
I could probably write another couple of pages, but if you want to read more, I would recommend buying the book or another similar piece of literature. There are many people writing on the topic… I think the next social networking article I write will be about hypertargeting ads on social networking websites. The idea is sort of like PPC on steroids. With sort of a saturated Pay Per Click market out there, especially on search engines, the value of targeting your advertising to very specific criteria becomes more and more important.
Selecting keywords for Search Engine Optimization
One of the big buzzwords in the online world right now is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you are familiar with the term, good for you. This article is intended for beginners and small business owners looking to improve their site a little bit without bleeding out the wallet. If you are not familiar with SEO, the gist is that you want people to find your website on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. If you sell puppy chow, when someone types “I want to buy puppy chow” in Google, you want to be one of the first results listed.
The process of SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website involves altering the content so that it does well in these organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The obvious idea is that if you are near the top of the most likely searches for your products, the more likely it is that people will visit your site, and therefore actually buy your product. One important concept here is that the more people who visit your website the better, but the important visitors are the ones who are going to buy your products. Anyone can put the words “nude coed cheerleaders” as a page title. Doing so will probably provide a jolt to your search hits, but you will most likely not see an increase in sales or whatever else you’re going for.
SEO is becoming big business, but there are a few key concepts that small businesses can use on their own to improve search rankings and increase traffic. There are all sorts of techniques employed in SEO including the following:
- Good linking strategy – who you link to and who links to you affects how Search Engines view the quality of your site
- Good infrastructure – sites should not have broken links or invalid HTML. Follow W3C recommendations for HTML document structure
- Use text navigation on your site
- Build a text site map, and link to it from every page of your site
- Friendly URLS – your URL should be a good indicator of what each page is about
- Limit use of Flash – flash content is typically unreadable by crawlers
- Avoid frames, javascript, etc
- Establish your site by submitting to the major directories, The Open Directory and the Yahoo! Directory, then build your link popularity by submitting to web directories, search engines, and requesting links from related websites.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign
- and finally Keywords
There are other key concepts as well but the ones listed above should provide a good start. I put keywords last because I believe that is the most important item on the list. More than anything else keywords tell the search engine, and your visitors, what your site is about. Keywords are located everywhere on your page. I’ll talk about this more later, but search engines look harder for keywords in some places over others. I will try to keep this to one article for now, our focus will be on how to select and place keywords in your site using 5 steps:
- Brainstorm
- Get Help!
- Examine your competition
- Analyze your words
- Keyword placement
1. Brainstorm
The ideal keyword is highly relevant (targeted), highly popular (lots of search volume) but not very competitive (fewer sites using that keyword, and those sites not well optimized for it). – Richard Goulde
The idea is that you want to use words that are obviously relevant, that people will actually use, but you don’t want to use the same words as everyone else. Take Home Base for example. If you type in “Home Base Web Solutions” in Google, this site will be the #1 result. That is a HIGHLY relevant term. It is also not competative at all… but if I want a custom built web application, would I search for that? uh. Hell to the No! Terms like “Custom Web Application” or “Columbus, Ohio web development” are words that I should probably focus more on.
It is good practice to develop an elevator statement or elevator pitch, namely a short, sharp summary of your business that could be delivered in the time it takes to go a couple of floors in an elevator. This pitch can be a good starting point for keyword development. Think about a couple different phrases that other people might search for when trying to find your products or services online. Go ahead, ask a buddy for help. In fact, your mom might call what you do something totally differnent than what you call it. It’s important to think in terms of your clients. Will your clients likely search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?
Now that you have a few words and phrases, group them into themes. You don’t want to saturate every page with keywords. Too many will confuse these magical crawlers as to what your page is actually about. Think about the theme of each major landing page on your site and group your keywords accordingly. Each page on your site should have 2-3 different keywords targeted.
2. Get Help!
You should have a decent list of words that describe your business at this point. As I mentioned, you’re not the target of your campaign though! There are a couple of tools out there that can help you expand your list. Below are a few options:
- One of the better ones I’ve found is Google Adwords Keyword tool. Try it out at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Simply enter a keyword or type in your URL and see the keywords that Google is finding on your site. Google will then show related keywords and their search volumes. Remember you want heavy volume, but not competative terms, so be careful what you add to your list.
- Trellian Keyword Suggestion Tool: http://keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. Same rules apply here.
- Finally, if you are interested in a souped up SEO campaign, sign up for wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com/. It can get expensive, but as with everything in life, you do get what you pay for.
3. Examine Your Competition
This item is fairly self explanatory, however, I’ll provide a little bit of guidance here because I like to write really, really, really long articles. You will have two types of competition and they often overlap.
- Business competition – You already know these guys. These are the companies that sell or provide the same service as you.
- Keyword competition – betcha didn’t think of this one! Go to Google and pretend like you’re searching for your company. You should get a few results that are unrelated to what you sell, but still show up pretty high on the search engine results page (SERP).
Pay close attention to what keywords your competition uses in their pages. WordTracker’s KEI (keyword effectiveness index) also allows it’s users to analyze their chosen search phrases to determine the level of competition for that phrase. You can do the same thing in Google, but it requires a little bit of work (sorry). Enter each of your prized keywords in Google surrounded by quotation marks (e.g. “puppy chow”). Once you search, Google will then display the results for all pages that target that phrase exactly as entered. In the top right, you should see how many results matched your search. This number tells you the competitiveness of each of your search phrases.
4. Analyze your words
I hope by now it’s all starting to come together. If you’re clever, you should be able to take everything I wrote so far and skip this section. Remember the keys: Highly relevant, Highly popular, not very competitive. So you should have highly relevant search terms grouped to fit each of the pages on your site. Your best terms within these groupings should be the ones that show heavy volume in the Google Adwords Keyword tool, but have the lowest number of SERP results in the top right corner of a Google search. Note, I’m obsessed with Google and it’s a good idea to try these techniques on other search engines too. If I mentioned them all I’d bore you to death.
Another good tool to use at this point is MSN’s tool for detecting online commercial intent: http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx. This tool estimates how likely it is a person using a particular search phrase means to buy, versus just looking for information. High commercial value means conversion is more likely.
At this point you should be able to “trim the fat.” If you have a hand full of similar keywords for a particular page, or even a few different spellings of the same keywords (singular, plural, etc), put them in excel and examine them based on the results given by the tools above. Choose the top 3 for each page and go to town!
5. Keyword Placement
So now we have a bunch of great keywords for your site. Where the heck do we put them?
- Title tag (<title>): All SEO experts agree the title tag is the most important tag on the page. It’s the first word or words the spider encounters and it’s the title of your page’s listing in the SERPs.
- Major headings and terms in bold and italics: Words in major heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) and words in bold and italics will also influence your ranking. These tags tell the user the highlighted terms are important to the page, and the spider sees them the same way. Make sure the emphasized words are keyword rich.
- Body of the text: Don’t forget to ensure your keywords are in the text. If you have trouble doing this, you might have chosen the wrong keywords.
- Hyperlinks: If you link to your own page, use the hot words for a link to describe the link with the keywords. Don’t use the URL as the hot link.
The first 200 words and the most emphasized words on your page should contain your keywords repeated several times. Don’t over do it, because it may be considered spam.
So that was easy, right? Selecting and placing good keywords for Search Engine Optimization can be tedious labor… and that’s why SEO experts get paid the big bucks. If you are interested in SEO, you know what’s coming, we do that. If you’re more of the Do It Yourself kind of person. Below are a few great links to get you started:
How Search Engines See Keywords
Q&A: A Few Things You Need to Know About Keyword Usage
Google SEO basics for beginners
SEOmoz – Beginners Guide to SEO
Search Engine Optimization basics