Posted by feedthebot

I just read Aaron Walls great article called "Social Media Free for All Pages," and it made me think about something I wanted to put out about social media and how we speak about it.

There seems to be one major thing that is left out of every post I have ever read about social media in the search marketing world, including here on SEOmoz.

The left out "thing" is the people who actually use the sites.

The SEO/SEM world is a tiny, little, iddy bitty community. If MySpace were a swimming pool, the entire SEO/SEM influence wouldn’t even fill a drop of water.

I think that as a whole we need to sit back and breathe and remember that the social web does not exist because of us. It exists because of interactions between people that have been happening for a very long time. The reason we should remember this isn’t because of "fake profile" controversies, it isn’t because of SMM advanced techniques, and it isn’t because of viral Facebook applications.

The reason that you should remember that social media is the communication between actual people is because acknowledging that fact will start you on the path of success in the social world.

I am a stupid drunk and I can beat virtually all the "gurus" in SMM because I build things for people. So can you.

I don’t see fake social media profiles as a way to get links, not for any moral reasons, but because links are not the goal. The goal is interaction and fake people can’t talk.

In Aaron Wall’s article, he mentions the motivations behind people’s interaction. He asked, "Who is paying them?," and he stated:

It is hard to create a destination, become an icon, or build a brand if you are stuck on a large anonymous network.

These are not goals or motivations that the vast, hugely vast, really really vast majority of people have. They do not want that, they do not care about that.

Has no one met a grumbly old man before? An 80 year old guy who constantly complains about some subject? That old man has complained about that subject his entire life. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about creating a destination, becoming an icon, or building a brand. He wants to complain.

If some parent has a child who is diagnosed with some disease, you know what happens? They seek advice and guidance from others facing the same difficulty, and they will interact with that community.

If someone is trying to learn about or become educated in a subject, they will discuss and interact with others doing the same thing.

These are social interactions. These are people.

The motivation behind social media is people interacting. Reaching those people interacting means providing a useful resource for their community or having a part in the conversation itself.

A thought experiment to put yourself in as marketers is this…

Can I market my product better by creating links or communicating with the people using my products?

Actually, let’s get more specific. You have 5,000 dollars and want to market your website about college student vacation destinations (I am pulling this scenario out of my butt).

How do you spend the 5,000 bucks?

Is it more valuable to get links than it is to have actual interactions with colleges?

My answer is no.

It is more valuable to have interactions with colleges than it is to have links.

Because the actual interactions are interaction, plus they end up providing links. Plus you see the challenges you face when you actually interact. Plus you learn more about your subject. Plus you get people who know you in areas of influence. Plus you are interacting with the actual people who are your customers. Plus you get to follow the road less traveled, the narrow path of actually taking the time and effort of interacting with people.

If you have a great resource for college students then you might want to spend that 5,000 dollars on gas and hotels and go on a road trip. Visit college campuses and talk to people.

Go to the first college and ask who is in charge of travel. Be a dumbass. Don’t pretend you know something you don’t know. You are not an expert, you are not a guru, you are simply a dumbass trying to figure something out. People are much more receptive to dumbasses than they are to "experts." Leave pride behind — pride is dumb and has no place in learning.

The meek will inherit kick ass social media campaigns. Meek rocks!

Go to the college news publication office. Say something like, "I have this resource and I want to expose it college communities but I do not know how because I am new to this." They will offer you a way to run an ad, but more importantly they might say something like "You might want to talk to this person." Go talk to "that" person. Find other "that" persons at other college campuses. Learn about the way it works. Screw links. You won’t get enough to beat the current industry leader so you need to do things they are not doing. Get in your car and go do it. If you don’t have a car then go Greyhound. If you can’t afford Greyhound then get on your local bus and go to your local colleges. Go to community colleges, go to every college in your city. Learn.

It is easier and more effective to create an online brand in today’s market through a portfolio approach of both offline and online actions.

If you are not paying attention to offline factors you are behind the curve, and you are offering a crack in your armor to your competitors.

But if you are not the industry leader, guess what? You can be. You just need to learn how to interact with your potential clients or customers better than the current industry leaders are.

Social media is, at its core, people and their reactions to stuff and each other. You have to have "stuff" to have people react to it.

"Stuff" could be a great resource that is valuable to a community.

In fact, many a marketer’s frustration is that they have a valuable resource online for a community but the community can’t find it or does not use it.

What do you do when you face this scenario?

Think about people. Go offline.

Social media is an online imitation of the interactions that people have offline.

To learn more about social media, learn more and study well how people interact offline in regards to the need your product provides a solution for.

The more you examine and participate in offline communication, the more clearly you will be able to understand how to leverage social interaction and social media for your product or service.

It is really about people.

 

- Patrick Sexton of SEOish.com

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Although I don’t usually do “announcement” type posts, I had to throw out my congratulations and best wishes to the Search Marketing Standard Magazine. The company has been acquired by iNET Interactive, and the staff of the magazine will remain in place. They are all jazzed about the future of the magazine, and as an avid reader, I am too. I wonder if this means we can convince them to move to a monthly print schedule (hint, hint). Anyway, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the magazine, you’re really missing out. It rocks. Go get your subscription now.

Congrats y’all, and…

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Tags: blogger web 2.0 free blogs wordpress themes digg

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Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance. ~Steven Wright
Comedian Steven Wright is often credited with launching an entirely new genre of stand-up comedy. His dead pan, monotone delivery of clever and kooky one-liners is always with a straight face, and no one had […]
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Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

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Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain (smart) I was still using Blogger (dumb) when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word.

These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.

Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).

Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.

• set the category base to /c and set the tag base to /t
• set the post slug to /%postname%/

Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.

After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.

Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).

Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)

redirect 301 /2008_07_01_archive.html http://www.fattyweightloss.com/2008/07/

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (\d{4})/(\d+)/(.*)\.shtml$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule (\d{4})/(\d+)/(.*)\.html$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.

Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.

If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:

• Name the root index.html to something like index5.html
• If you have a /2004/ folder make it something like /12004/

After these are renamed or deleted click around the site and verify it generally works.

Step 7: Installed a couple SEO related plug ins.

Akismet - comment anti-spam tool installed by default, but I had to get an API key and enable it.

SEO Title Tag - allows you to make the page title and H1 post heading different…great for on page optimization.

Redirection plug in - keeps track of 404 errors and allows you to redirect URLs.

What I did, rather than redirecting URLs, was find the URL slugs that did not align with the old URLs and rewrite the URL slugs to add the stop words into it (I believe the most common ones were and and the).

I monitored 404 errors logged by the redirection plug in for ~ 4 days and fixed everything I came across. I figure all the important, well linked to, and/or high traffic posts should have got traffic within the first 4 days.

After 8 weeks I will flush the 404 error log and look for any stray link equity that I am not capturing, and redirect those URLs to their new location.

WASABI Related Entries - this plug in automatically creates a list of related entries wherever you like in your theme (you can install it in the sidebar or possibly after your comments). The beauty of such a plug in is that it allows you to keep more of your PageRank flowing internally, and it allows you to put a bunch more keyword rich content within a page without it looking spammy. For instance, given the following image you know what the related post is about without even seeing it.

Lorell reviewed a variety of other related post plug ins.

Step 8: While I was fixing up my mom’s URLs I helped offset the revenue shortfall from the short term traffic decline by using IE conditional comments to place an extra AdSense block on her 404 page when Internet Explorer viewers accessed the error page.

Step 9: Final window dressings

Use Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl the site to look for any broken links you need to fix. Please note that you may need to change the number of threads running or Xenu might get blocked by your server. I had no luck with 30 threads, but 4 worked ok.

Set up your robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from trying to create search pages (?s=). Also prevent them from trying to index admin pages, feeds, trackback URLs, and the p= post URLs (presuming you are using post slugs as mentioned above).

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /*p=
Disallow: /?q=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /*trackback
Disallow: /*feed
Disallow: /*wp-login
Disallow: /*wp-admin
Disallow: /*xmlrpc.php

Matt Cutts offers some tips to protect your Wordpress blog from getting hacked. Patrick Altoft offers tips on how to use a Google Alert to check if your blog gets hacked.

Map out keyword strategy and assign old posts to related categories. Set your default category to something that is useful rather than leaving it as uncategorized. While editing particularly high traffic posts it might make sense to see if the page title or page contents could be further improved to make the post even more successful. In some cases a post can rank for a wide array of related keywords.

While ensuring that are category pages are linked to sitewide, I used conditional PHP statements in the sidebar.php file for monthly archives such that they were linked to from the homepage, but not from the individual post pages. This drives more link equity toward the category level pages, while driving less to the date based archives (as we would rather rank for low fat recipes than for August 2007).

<?php if ( is_home() || is_page() ) { ?>
<li><p class=”sidebar-title”>Archives</p>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>

As a bonus, one could also add a plug in for editing default category pages, but we have not done that yet as we still have a long way to go with categorizing the current contents first. Anyone know of a good plug-in to edit category pages?

More SEO Tips….
Tags: blogs wordpress myspace free hosting rand fishkin

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I recently had an email chat with Alden DoRosario from Chitika about the recent rapid growth of their ad network. They have been aggressively signing up bloggers and other independent publishers, and are now getting over 2 billion monthly impressions, with their behaviorally targeted Premium ads getting hundreds of millions of monthly search driven impressions, putting their search distribution network on par with Ask.com.

How their premium ad network works is they target the ads to be relevant to search query that sent traffic to the publisher’s site, thus even if the ads are not shown on a search page they still are seen by searchers right after they search and click through to the site.

Alden gave me a link for a $75 bonus code for any publisher that makes $75 in commissions before the end of October. Publishers are paid 60% of the ad click value, with the house getting 40%. I just added their ads to my mom’s weight loss blog. It looks like their ad network is not quite as deep as Google’s but they do well for higher volume search queries.

Most search engines are a backbone for an ad network, but it is hard to build query volume for a new search engine. Just look at how few people have used Wikia Search in spite of endless hype. Wikia Search got a couple million lifetime searches whereas Chitika gets billions of monthly ad impressions.

Most people do not feel they have a search problem, but many publishers feel their content could be monetized better. If you didn’t have huge search distribution how would you create a search ad network? If an ad network grows big enough do you think they could do it the other way around, using their ad network distribution as a backbone to start a search engine?

Disclaimer: The free $75 bonus is an affiliate link, but when I chatted with Chitika I pushed hard to get publishers the best payout bonus and longest payout bonus period possible rather than focusing on trying to maximize my commissions.

More SEO Tips….
Tags: blogs blogging free hosting delishio

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.