Back in January, I wrote an article about the science, art, and magic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In that article I discussed a number of things you could do to your site to improve its search engine ranking. Now, all these months later, I’m writing this follow-up to explain how social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, can further help your endeavors.

We recently met with a Search Engine Marketing firm, Site-Seeker, to discuss an event we’re co-hosting next month. Our conversation flowed to social networking and how we needed to do more to support our marketing efforts. Curious about how we could utilize social networks as a marketing tool and a search engine ranking booster, we arranged for Site-Seeker to present to our management group a seminar on this subject in preparation for our October 15th event.

Let me first discuss a few of the social networking sites and how they may or may not be helpful.

MySpace. Don’t spend your precious time here, MySpace is a wasteland of disastrously hideous personal webpages. A true blight on the digital landscape of the Internet.

Facebook. Primarily a business-to-consumer opportunity, creating a fan page for your company can help generate positive word-of-mouth and increase your authority (more on authority later), as well as provide an avenue to advertise events and other business messages. Facebook is best for those businesses targeting consumers.

LinkedIn. A business-to-business opportunity, this social networking site is best for businesses targeting other businesses. This site provides a professional environment to network with other professionals and businesses in your line of work, as well as those businesses seeking services you provide, or businesses providing services you need. This site can be used to increase your authority and to make valuable business connections.

Twitter. A runaway success, Twitter has turned into the 900lb. gorilla of social networking overnight. This service lets you send out short messages (up to 140 characters, called “tweets”) to the “world.” If you’re lucky, one or more of your followers will like your tweet, and “retweet” it to their own followers, creating a ripple effect of information dispersal. This is a powerful and immediate social network.

YouTube. A bunch of weird, wonderful, and wacky videos typically created by everyday “normal” people. YouTube is a good avenue to share videos advertising or demonstrating your services. Personally, I still consider YouTube as entertainment, not a marketing opportunity (unless you’re selling entertainment, I suppose).

Social Networks Don’t Directly Help with SEO
At our meeting with Site-Seeker, we focused on Twitter with a secondary emphasis on LinkedIn. For our needs, LinkedIn, as a professional social networking tool, allows us to reach a business audience. Twitter, on the other hand, lets us instantly connect with our audience and more speedily increase its size. Facebook is not as useful for us, but if you’re trying to reach consumers, this is probably a better choice for you than LinkedIn. Either way, Twitter is a good place to start.

Normally, to improve your SEO ranking, we advise having other relevant sites link to yours. This is by far the absolute most important aspect to search engine ranking. It’s also the most difficult to achieve. So, wouldn’t it be helpful then to set up pages for your company on these social networks and post links to your site? Sadly, no.

When you post a link on these social networks, the networks specially inhibit search engines from following that link. This means that a search engine won’t see the links to your site from these social networks. Therefore, the links do not directly affect your ranking. So, what’s the use of the social networks, then?

Networking, silly! These social networks provide a channel directly to your audience. As your audience grows, so does your authority. And when you are the authority, you become the go-to resource when your type of services are needed.

With Twitter, you begin by following other people in your line of work (to “follow” in Twitter means to subscribe to that person’s tweets). In turn, those people will probably follow you. Continue to build your follower network, but try to follow fewer people than there are people following you. Further, post regularly. On occasion, it’s likely that someone following you will retweet something you tweeted. The retweet then gets sent to all of that user’s followers, thus increasing your audience and possibly bringing you new followers. This process goes on and on as you continue to build your followers and authority.

I see this as less search engine optimization, but more marketing. In the case of Twitter, perhaps we should call it Twarketing.

Craig Samson

Let’s start with the hard facts. Not even the most experienced SEO-specializing firms can guarantee specific search engine rankings in any search engine. Further, every search engine uses different proprietary (and mostly secret) algorithms for indexing and ranking sites according to various keywords. As such, SEO efforts can miss the mark and hurt your website rankings. Of course, the efforts may also boost your ranking in one or more search engines. A sketchy business, SEO.

Major Search Engines

Remember that every other website owner also wants to be on the first page of search results, and many of them are doing their best to insure that happens, just like you. With competition so stiff, especially if your website’s topic is “common,” it is impossible to guarantee positive results.

However, there are things you can do to improve your chances and make your site more “attractive” to search engines such as Google. In this week’s article I share some of the most common techniques.

These recommendations are generally for all sites, but not every recommendation is necessary for every website. Your site’s size and complexity will dictate how far you need to go. Use your best judgement.

• Have other relevant websites link to yours. Ask related sites to place a link to your site, offer to link back in return. Also, wherever possible, get on higher-ranked websites related to yours and post information; include a link back to your website. I can’t stress enough the importance of having other websites link to yours; this is one of the main ways to get your site ranked highly in search engines!
• Get a domain name that features your primary keyword as part of it. This point is practical if you don’t have a domain name yet or are willing to buy a second domain name. Regardless, this suggestion reflects a perfect world scenario. It’s very helpful to your rankings to have your primary keyword as part of your domain name, but this may be very hard to do.
• Insure that your site has a clear hierarchy and is easily navigable through static links. Search engines love text links instead of image links, and love any “static” link over a dynamic link. Dynamic links are the kind that usually contain a ? in the URL. If you do use images as links, be sure that those images (and every other image on your site) contains an alt-text entry (this is the text that appears next to your mouse pointer when you point at an image in your web browser).
• Avoid putting important content in Flash, frames, or Javascript. These technologies are not always search engine friendly, although search engines are catching on. Still, I’d recommend staying away.
• Insure that page titles within the HTML are unique and descriptive. Further, page titles should include your primary keywords to stress their importance.
• Choose your keywords precisely, and then list them in a descending order of priority in your keyword meta tag. Don’t go crazy here, just come up with a short list of keywords. Imagine which terms people trying to find your site would be typing into their favorite search engine and use those. Don’t repeat keywords over and over as this will specifically hurt your site ranking.
• Write well. Content is king! Clear and accurate descriptive page content is extremely important. It is this text that the search engines are indexing to rank your site, afterall. And for the sake of your readers, take the time to read your content out loud to insure it sounds smooth and natural.
• Prepare a marketing budget that includes an expenditure for search engine advertising. Placing targeted ads in keyword-relevant search results can have a positive effect on traffic flow to your website. While technically not an SEO “trick,” this is the quickest fix that gives positive results for any site. Watch your advertising account closely to insure that it’s effective!
• Submit a sitemap to search engine crawlers. A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of all the pages in your site that you wish to be indexed.
• Keep your site free of broken hyperlinks and badly formed HTML. Not only do search engines dislike broken hyperlinks, but so do your site visitors. A broken link doesn’t exactly build confidence.
• Update your site often; keep your pages fresh with news, new products, new services, etc. Rewrite some of your content now and then to reflect updated keywords and fresh ideas. A dusty old site won’t rank highly.
• Don’t use too many links on any one page. Google recommends less than 100.
• Ideally, keep the typical size of any page to less than 50KB. In fact, 15KB is recommended. This trick helps your search engine ranking, and speeds up navigating your site overall.
• Submit your website only once to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Nagging them certainly won’t help; I know that didn’t work with my mother either.

There are some dirty old tricks that search engines have caught onto over the years. If you’re guilty of using these tricks, your site may be lower in ranking or not listed at all. Avoid all of these:

• Don’t use irrelevant keywords and descriptions. This just doesn’t make sense to a search engine.
• Avoid hidden text or hyperlinks. This especially includes white text on a white background, or any other same or similar color combinations used to hide text.
• Don’t repeat keywords over and over in sequence. A certain degree of natural repetition can occur among your title, keywords, description, and content—and this is helpful. Ceaseless repetition of a keyword, however, will kill the keyword in your ranking.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with mostly duplicate content. This issue causes the same problem as the previous bullet.

If you’re retrofitting an existing site, carefully review it and create a checklist of items to improve. It may be necessary to rewrite copy, reorganize the site hierarchy, or even rebuild it from scratch. If you’re building a new website, incorporate healthy SEO practices in every decision from the start. Keep in mind, though, that no matter what you do, nobody can guarantee results. These suggestions are simply best practice and will give your site a fighting chance to achieve excellent rankings.

Finally, if anyone promises a quick fix to your site that will dramatically improve your rankings, then run! SEO is a continuous process of quality improvement to your site, not an overnight cure.

Craig W. Samson