seobridges.com

No matter whether you’re a social media novice, aficionado, or expert, there is bound to be something in this book you can glean from. It’s a great resource for teachers and students, and it covers all of the basis from blogging to the importance of a social media plan.

If you’ve read this book, let me know your thoughts. I’d love to glean from you, and learn what has and has not worked. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can buy it below.

The Social Media Survival Guide by Deltina Hay

You can learn more about Deltina by visiting her website, Social Media Power, or following her @Deltina.

Stay social, my friends!

Erick

With the rise of social media curation tools like Storify , the value of what you tweet and post on Facebook is becoming largely dependent upon the relationships between the category of your website and the categories of the website(s) your tweeting or posting about.

Right now, if I Google ‘Social Media,’ I receive 161,000,000 hits. If I search for ‘Social Media’ within the last 24 hours, I receive 56,400,000 hits. It would take countless wasted hours to sort through all of those hits.

Google categorizes your site according to the anchor text, title, and keywords in the URL of your site’s pages. They also use the anchor text, title, and keywords in the URL of sites you link to to determine how relatable your site is to that topic.

So, if you want to find the most relevant blogs and articles on any given topic within any period of time, use the search parameters allinanchor:seo+content, allinurl:seo+content or allintitle:seo+content. You can also use a combination of those three if you want very specific results.

The Web is becoming more and more dependent upon relationships. Not just relationships between people, but also relationships between websites. Go through your website and consider the keywords in your anchor text, url, and title. Consider the same of sites you link to, tweet, or post on Facebook. Finally, consider their relationships and the the relevancy of their relationships to the overall message of your site.

For more on how to get the most out of Google, check out this Free Search Guide.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I blog utilizing several personas:  JeSais for my personal blog, Carmen Electrode is my work affiliated online persona, and Joe Welder for my boss.  It sounds more complicated than it is.

I won’t go into too many details about my personal blog–  mostly because it’s not really relevant to search engine optimization.  I started it learn more about blogging.  I would note, however, that if you do blog, keep in mind you are not necessarily as invisible as you think you are.  My own personal rule of thumb is to never post anything online that you would not want your mother or future employer to read.

The company I work for, Arc-Zone.com, sells welding accessories. Primarily an online business, we serve a variety of clients from independent fabricators to industrial manufacturers around the world. For work I manage the two company blogs:  CarmenElectrode.com and JoeWelder.com.

One way that I distinguish the voice of Carmen Electrode from Joe Welder is by selection of topic.  I use the CarmenElectrode.com blog to (hopefully) dispel some myths about the kind of work that welding is, and the kind of women who actually weld.  I also write about equality in the workplace, and other issues of importance to women welders.  And Rosie the Riveter–I blog about Rosies.  I repost articles profiling the original Rosies, stories about the Rosie the Riveter Parks, statues, and memorials, and I also write regular profiles of women in the industry for a section I call “The New Rosies.”

The Joe Welder blog is primarily my boss’ platform (who is the owner of Arc-Zone.com) so the posts are topics that reflect his history in the racing industry and as a master fabricator as well as his personal interests:  So Cal culture, cars, mountain biking and green manufacturing to name a few.  One regular feature is Ask Joe for write-ups of technical inquiries, and the solutions our company experts provide.  We also post about customer service, new products in our webstore, and how we differentiate ourselves from others in the industry.

Another tool I use to distinguish voice is diction and word selection. For Carmen Electrode I tend to use more flowery, “feminine” language… a voice that is probably closer to my “real” voice (though maybe a bit more hip and fun!).  Jim (my boss, aka Joe Welder)  writes many of the posts himself, though I do edit them for him. I strive to maintain his diction and his use of words like “dialed in” or “check it out” or “bitchin” even when writing posts as “Editor.”

Whether I’m online as Carmen or Joe, because these are business blogs there is a level of professionalism that we always maintain.  It is one of our company’s core beliefs that in order to flourish, we must maintain a positive atmosphere.  The blogs are not places to dish dirt on the industry, on our competitors, or on vendors that let us down. Instead they are places to celebrate the industry that we contribute to and benefit from.  I’ll talk about this in more depth in my next post on maintaining integrity.

–
Jennifer Simpson, aka JeSais
DID I BLOG YOU?
http://akajesais.com/

When I offered to guest blog for Erick and SEO Bridges I hadn’t fully formulated my ideas about online identity, but it’s a topic that fascinates me.  For this initial post I wanted to introduce myself, and let you know what I’ll be blogging about.

My name is Jennifer Simpson, but you’ll also find me online as JeSais (my nickname), Carmen Electrode (my work online persona), or sometimes as Joe Welder (in my boss’ stead).  I’ve been online since the 1980s (I worked for a government affiliated agency with access to parts of ARPANET). It was the late 80s. I was very very young.  I’d like to say that I was a child computer genius.

I’ve been blogging personally since 2004 and contributed to the now defunct (for all intents and purposes) SanDiegoBlog, a community blog. More recently I started a blog for my graduate program, the Creative Writing /MFA Program at the University of New Mexico.  I also served as a panelist on the Performance and Electronic Media: from Spoken Word to Social Networks panel earlier this year at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference.

Since 2005 I’ve been blogging for Arc-Zone.com, Inc. In fact, the company blog that I started, www.CarmenElectrode.com, was the first in the welding industry!  I soon followed that blog with another industry blog, www.JoeWelder.com.  Each of these blogs has a distinct voice, and as the editor and creative writer behind-the-scenes, it is my job to ensure the integrity and unique quality of each site.  I’m proud to say that by starting these blogs I garnered an Image of Welding Award from the American Welding Society in 2009.

While blogs are one of the best tools out there for search engine optimization, providing fresh relevant, key-word-rich content for your website, for me they are a great way to communicate with customers and build relationships.  People do business with people and with a blog you can let your customers know who you are in a way they won’t get from your ecommerce site.

In future posts I will cover ways to articulate distinct voices, how to maintain authenticity, how to maintain integrity, and how much is too much information to share. And if there’s a question you have, leave a comment and I’ll try my best to address your question in an upcoming post!

Jenn

LINKS:
http://akajesais.com
http://joewelder.com
http://carmenelectrode.com
http://arc-zone.com
http://unmcreativewriting.wordpress.com/

Akismet is good at combating most comment spam, but it doesn’t catch everything.  Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if someone took the time to read my blog and comment, or if they just posted a generic comment.

If you comment, “nice blog,” or even post a longer comment that does not mention me or anything about my blog, I won’t publish your comment.  I’ll assume you wrote out a generic comment to a Word doc, such as, “Most of what I read online is trash and copy and paste, but you definitely add value. Bravo,” and you copied and pasted that to numerous blogs without reading those blogs.

To everyone who takes the time to read and comment on my blogs, I appreciate your comments.  Though, unless you mention me, my blog, or something relevant to the topic I blogged about, I can’t decipher whether you read my blog and wrote out that comment or if you just copied and pasted generic comments to random blogs.

The purpose of blogging is to spur conversation.  Posting random comments to random blogs without reading those blogs is like pretending to have a conversation with a person, while nodding, thinking about something else, saying ‘right’ every few moments, and leaving without any notion of what that person just said.

Perhaps, you’re thinking, ‘Who cares?  A comment is a comment.’  I don’t think the laziness of SEO content writers or bloggers who cut corners should be rewarded.  Let’s keep the conversation going by respecting one another enough to post comments that encourage conversation.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

I’m going to teach you how to target your visitors to get more out of your blogs.  Here are some statistics for you: 23.24% of all traffic to my site comes from referring sites, many of those visitors come from social networking sites, and 5.79% of all visitors to my site come from Facebook.  The numbers go on, but I won’t bore you.  Except for one: 87.3% of all people who visit my site from Facebook are new.  If you want to follow along in Google Analytics, go into your profile, set your analytics tool to a certain date range, then select:

Traffic Sources >> Referring Sites >> Facebook (or whichever referring site you want to use).

Find the blue box that says “Referral Path”.  You may see one or more paths from your chosen referral source to your site, depending on how viral your message went.  Facebook isn’t as viral as Twitter.  So, the path to your Facebook page is probably first.

After you click there, click on the squiggly lines to the left of visits, which will reveal a graph of when people went to my site.  Below the graph, above where you just clicked, you’ll notice you’re in the “Site Usage” tab.  Below that is the blue word “None”.  Click on that, look over to last word in the first column, and select “Landing Page”.  Now, another box titled “None” will appear to the right of “Landing Page”.  Click that, click “Visitor type”, and check out what pages are attracting new and returning visitors.

So, it should look like this:

None >> Landing Page then look to the right None >> Visitor Type

This will tell you what types of visitors from Facebook (new or returning) are landing on which pages in your site.  Now, you can play with these two filters to find out quite a bit about the users who come to your site from your chosen referral site.  This graph also shows how long they’re staying on those pages, the average bounce rates for their visits, and how many pages on average per visit people who go to those particular pages are going to.

There’s much more you can do here, but I am going to let you explore.  You can also follow the same steps with Twitter, Google, or any other medium.  The point is to focus one type of visitor, figure out what type of information attracts that type of visitor, and use that to your advantage.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

After you’ve identified which pages result in your highest bounce and/or exit rates and you’ve fixed those pages, move on to see where you’re getting the most love from.  If you’re watching your analytics on Google, they categorize your visitors according to direct traffic, search engine traffic, referring sites, and other.  If you’re unsure of what these are, I explained them in this blog: The X and Y Factors of SEO.

Since everyone knows search is dead, you can disregard what your analytics says about Google sending the most (or a large portion of) traffic to your site.  All Web analytics platforms have just not updated their systems to show that search is dead, and Google (being dead itself) is of course going to tell you that they send a large portion of traffic to your site.

If you’re name is Sheldon Cooper, you probably didn’t get that that last paragraph was sarcasm (Bazinga!).  For the rest of us, since a large portion of our traffic comes from search engines, we want to pay attention to our content.  I blogged about this last week in a blog titled, Google Analytics and Keyword Density.

The point is to figure out who’s sending you the most amount of traffic and pander to their every whim.  Okay, don’t pander to their every whim, but figure out what you’re saying that attracts people from those sites to your site.  What specific blogs or pages are they going to?  What are you talking about?  Talk about those topics more.  What are they talking about?  Answer their questions, and involve them in discussions.  Find out what the people want to know, and tell them what they want to know.  It’s that simple.  Kind of.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

If you write Web/SEO content, you write.  You may not write well, but you write.  And the secret writing well is stealing from others who write better.  No, I don’t mean plagiarism.  I mean finding out what works and adapting what works to your own writing style.  Any good writer will tell you not to try something new, especially when you are a new writer.  Find out what works, and figure out how to adapt your voice to what works.  Take for example Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight Series.  There’s nothing new about vampires, but she gave them a modern-day twist.  So, what does this have to do with Web content?

First, If you want to decrease your site’s bounce rate, find out what pages have the highest bounce rates, find sites that rank in the top ten for your keywords on the major search engines, go to those pages on their sites where you’re having issues with your bounce rates, and figure out what they do on those pages to keep people around longer.

Second, do the same thing with those pages with the highest exit rates.  Many times those pages with the highest bounce rate will also have the highest exit rates, since people are exiting them within seconds of finding them.  Though, that may not always be the case.  Whether it is or not, figure out what you’re doing wrong, find websites that are doing things right, and learn from them.

If you can learn from them and improve on what they’re doing, you’ll find your bounce and/or exit rates on those pages will go down.  Though, remember, not all exits from a website are bad.  Sometimes, it means the person found what they wanted to find.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Of course you should blog.  The question should be, ‘what should I blog about’?  Well, what is the theme, or the central purpose, of your website?  Blog about your site’s central purpose or things related to your site’s central purpose.  I started blogging about social media marketing (SMM) and SEO/Web content.  I branched out and started blogging about social media monitoring.  Of course, I continue to blog about SEO and SMM, but there’s nothing wrong with branching out as long as you stay on topic.

Offer people information they want, but offer it to them in alternative ways.  For instance, every Friday, just to break routine, I write a ‘This week in social media’ blog.  I deviate some times, depending on how I’m feeling, but I like to break things up at the end of the week.  Aside from that, the closer it gets to the end of the week the less likely a person is to read blogs.  Their minds are on the weekend.

Another good way to break things up is to post videos on your blogs.  Or you can also post video blogs (vlogs).  I haven’t done any vlogs yet, but I might try them at some point.  A few weeks ago, I decided to have some fun and post a Bruce Lee video.  I titled that blog, “How to be the Bruce Lee of SEO content” and compared Bruce Lee’s fighting style to writing good SEO content.

Whatever you do with your blog make sure to keep your audience engaged.  Ask questions.  Post videos.  Start a conversation.  Keep it fresh.  And no matter what, develop a central purpose for your blog and stick to it.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

For anyone new to the concept of SEO, that is an acronym for search engine optimization.  If you are referring to a person who engages in search engine optimization it can also stand for search engine optimizer.  With that said, an SEO does not simply write SEO content, rather an SEO does whatever is necessary to make sure your site is optimized for the search engines.

So, let’s take a quick look at link building, which is one thing an SEO does to optimize your site.  Remember that quote by John Donne, “No man is an island”?  Well, all websites are islands until you start building bridges.  Think of Google, Bing, and the other search engines like the main land.  They can’t get to your site, or even see that your site exists, unless they can cross the Internet waters by link bridges.  And the more link bridges that connect your site to the mainland, the more often they’ll visit you.

Do you have a blog?  No!  Well, guess what.  The search engines love blogs.  Sure you can find a site like yours, write them an e-mail, and ask them if they want to exchange links with you.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but I would not spend too much time doing that.  Writing those e-mail takes time and are often just a little more than fruitless.  The best way to get links to your site is to write good content for your site that will attract readers who will want to link to your site.  That’s it for today.

Stay social my friends,

Erick