The NEW Social Media Strategy - how to get rankings from your social channels

During the last quarter of 2013 I started to change my view on Social Media and the benefits from it to search engine ranking; tests that I was undertaking didn’t really give any credence (improved ranking) to the fact that Google love it when you post and engage with people of social media.

Sometimes there was a improvement in ranking, but constant Retweeting, Liking or Sharing of posts on Twitter and Facebook did nothing to improve ranking.

The majority of people I know in SEO would swear blind that I should see some benefit, but no!  Absolutely nothing! So what’s going on?

On further investigation I noticed that the social channels that saw a jump in rankings contained a sustained stream of related (or themed) posts; could this be the secret!

I tested a little more and indeed, I realised that I definitely seemed to get ranking benefits from accounts and sites that contained lots of themed social posts.

Then, mid January, Matt Cutts confirmed this approach (see my other post here).

What Matt basically says is that where they can get access to profile and posts, Google treats them just like any other website, they will look at the authority that you provide and pass that onto any linked sites.

So the strategy for the use of social media for ranking now seem very clear; view your social channel as a microsite; ensure that you tweet or post lots of themed (related) posts often (ensuring that you add the URL’s that you want to rank for). 

Ensure that your posts contain your keywords (like any website don’t spam them).

Treat your social channel like you would any small website, remember that content is king because you still want people to engage with you and link to your social posts; follow this simple advice and you’ll soon find that main webpage starts to see an improvement in ranking.

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Improving your Google+ posts

Text based Google+ posts can be dull, and many users seem to have difficultly in making them look exciting!

Simply changing the font throughout a post can add to the the impact of them and make people read your post rather than someone else's post.

So how do you get your text to include bold, italic and strikethrough effects?  It's actually very simple.

Type your post to your stream.
Any words you want to be shown in bold simply enclose them in *’s (i.e. *text*)
Any words you want to be shown as italic, simply enclose them in *’s (i.e. _text_)
Any words you want to be shown as strikethrough, simply enclose them in *’s (i.e. -text-)

You can also combine these 'shortcodes' like so to get bold and italic for example (i.e. *_text_*)

Have fun

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Twitter doesn’t use Twitter and Facebook social signals to rank pages

Matt Cutts (Google's head of search spam) yesterday explained this in a video (see below) that whilst the Google algorithm doesn’t treat social sites any differently to aid (or otherwise) webpage ranking, where they can they do still crawl and index the page like they do for any other website.

What does this mean in practice for website owners and brand managers that currently undertake social media in order to gain improved rankings? Simply don’t stop what you are doing!

Whilst the fact that you are engaging with your market doesn’t explicitly mean that your rankings will improve, some of this engagement will lead naturally to users taking a look at your site and offerings; this traffic is highly desirable.

The fact that Google does crawl and take notice of social channels does mean that a well crafted and themed channel presence could still rank well in the Google index or be seen as having a good amount of authority and any links back to your webpages become more influential in your own rankings.

In the future think about your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ page as being more of a microsite for your business and brand.

Great content

The learning to take from this video is that we should all continue to do what Google have always recommended and that is we develop great content that visitors will want to read and share through their social channels and other web properties.

Future

There is no doubt that in the future things may change, especially as Google become more adept at understand the value and authority that a particular author may have. If for example Matt himself comments on someone else’s SEO themed blog post then it is unlikely to change anything about their ranking; when Google fully understand that the Matt Cutts who just commented on that blog post has some authority in SEO, then it could affect ranking.

In Summary

Continue to do what you do in Social Media, do not ignore the content, don’t expect great leaps in ranking though your social engagement.

The Full Video

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SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

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Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

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Optimise your LinkedIn pages

Whether it’s your person page and you want the next great job offer, or it’s your company page, a well optimise page will do you a world of good.

Think Visually
Use bold images to provide a real world glimpse into you or your business.

Think Digitally
Whatever you say, keep it brief. Remember that online, attention span is shorter.

Think Video
Showcase with real stories or examples to engage members more deeply.

Think Customised
Adapt your content to viewers based on their LinkedIn profiles. Target based on geography, job title, industry that you want to attract etc.

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Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context. 

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 

Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

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