Smart Strategies to boost your Social Media Optimisation:

This document evaluates the impact of second generation web innovations which fit under the Web 2.0 banner and suggests how clients can best incorporate these elements into smart social media optimisation strategies. We have interpreted the phrase web 2.0, as coined by internet publisher Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media in 2004, to mean those new web innovations which harness the network effects and collective intelligence of the web . This includes Web-based services such as RSS, blogs, social networking sites, bookmarking sites as well as specific new search trends such as Vertical search sites.

Not all these new applications will revolutionise your search strategy but it is important to test, learn and establish options which offer real value for the future. We at Barracuda Digital hope you enjoy exploring the next development in search marketing and welcome any feedback.

Characteristics of web 2.0 sites:

2.0 web-sites exhibit a number of similar characteristics which include the following features:

• Sharing content and user generation
• Architecture which promotes active participation and democracy and encourages users to add value to the application. Example: Amazon inviting reader to submit reviews
• A rich, interactive, user-friendly interface which utilise the latest design applications such as Ajax and RSS
• Social-networking elements which harness the collective opinion and conversation of communities.
• A continued commitment to experiment and improve the userexperience,combine design elements such as mash-ups and incorporate different web applications, API and technology.

Right here right now!

Social Search is not something that it off in the distance, it is happening right now and driving adoption and take-up

1. RSS Feeds and SEO

   What is it ?

   Really Simple Syndication or RSS is a format for distributing online content. RSS, or feeds, are consumed through RSS readers such Netvibes or bloglines, portals such as MyYahoo or Google,or Applications, Firefox or new version of Internet Explorer. Rather than remembering to visit websites, or track email newsletters, feeds of information are delivered to your reader in the form of headlines making information consumption more effective.

   How does RSS work?

   If you publish a new web page of content by listing the page as an "item" in your RSS file, you can have the page appear in front of those who read information using RSS readers or "news aggregators". Thus, RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving summaries of the latestcontent from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

   How does it boost SEO performance?

   • RSS also allows people to easily add links to your content within their own web pages. Bloggers are a huge core audience that especially does this.
   • RSS provides fresh content to search engine spiders. Fresh content provides food to search engine spiders, which give them energy to crawl and improve your rankings
   • RSS boosts site optimisation efforts by creating RSS feedscontaining top search engine results for the keyword / keywords you are targeting adding them to the client website MSN and Yahoo News. Many of the blog search engines also offer RSS feeds of their results. Before placing a search engine feed on a website, be sure to check whether use of the feed on a website is restricted in any
   • It is also excellent for the distribution for category offers
   • We can integrate our RSS through Google Base
   • Click through rates from RSS feeds are generally higher than email. When information is available at product level consumers using RSS feeds are also more likely to engage and purchase through this channel, as they are 100% opt-in.
   • We can integrate our RSS through Google Base
   • Improves your inbound links. Increase link popularity by submitting the RSS feed, blog or podcast to the appropriate directories. The following directories allow submissions of specific kinds of RSS feeds. Be sure to follow the guidelines of each site and choose categories wisely.
   • RSS enables themes of pages in SEO to be strengthened. Feeds should be themed. This will help with themed links back to a publisher's website from anyone syndicating the feed's content.

   Example: Submit RSS feeds – http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

   

2. "Social Bookmarking" Search

   What is Social Bookmarking?

   Social Bookmarking sites are composed of communities of users who submit, categorize, and describe websites to share with otherswho will likewise find the content useful. Bookmarkings site enable people to create categories in which they can collaborate to create a list of resources about a particular topic. Often the highest ranked site submissions feature prominently in the Site results, while new suggestions might gain popularity over time. The most popular social tagging sites areDelicious, Reddit, digit and with new ones emerging all the time.

   How do bookmarking sites work?

   Users categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags allowing users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services have also implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.The increasing popularity of bookmarking sites have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification and feed subscription.

   Tips for getting content bookmarked

   • Make your content and topic news easy to bookmark. For example 'Ten ways to optimise a website' If the news you post is compelling and timely enough for readers, the readers will cast their approval by voting for your news. The more votes you receive, the higher up the list your news feature will appear.
   • Secondly, make the pages easy to tag and bookmark by adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us".
   • Make sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link and the tag on your pages firstly for the most popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).

   

   How does it boost your SEO performance?

   • High levels of bookmarks boost your SEO performance by improving your spidering. By identifying how many sites have bookmarked or voted for your site, the engines can use this data as a modifier for their rankings.
   • Improves your link popularity. If many sites have bookmarked your pages, this means that there will be links to your site from other pages. The search engines can then use this data for their link popularity counts.
   • Tagging. Based on how users tag your site, the engines can use this data for their semantic analysis. For example if your article is tagged with the word “online PR” ,the engines can add this data tothe information they have about your site and improve your rankings in the “online PR”keyword category.
   • Improves Crawling Process. The search engines crawl sites such as Technorati and del.icio.us often. So, if people bookmark or vote for your site it will help your pages get crawled quicker.

3. Social networks

   What are social networks?

   Social networks refer to online networks where people are encouraged to build a network by connecting with their friends or contacts to share information, ideas and hobbies. Probably the best known Social network is myspace with over 100 million registered members which allows members to share images, videos and music. MySpace currently ranks sixth place in traffic terms behind Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and while they are still comparatively tiny in terms of overall percentage, the fact that they're climbing the rankings ladder so rapidly has the industry questioning whether we're looking at the portals of the future. The best known professional network is linked-in which is a world wide professional networking site enabling users to build a personal network of professional associates and contacts.

   How do they work?

   Build a profile for your brand, product or yourself on sites like MySpace, frienster, Second Life and linked in. For a branded page you may want to build a professionally designed presence or use existing templates offered by the community for yourself. The self-publishing tools these sites offer are easy to use and accessible to everyone.

   Example: Honda’s Page on Myspace

   

   How does it benefit your SEO results?

   Encourages direct links from well trafficked sites back to your personal site or your branded website. Building relationships with other well-regarded members is a great strategy for promoting your own material.

   Stay engaged with the people who visit your pages: posting new content relevant to these audiences and responding to friend requests you receive. You will soon find that the users of these sites will start adding their own content on your page and linking back to you.

4. Blogs

   What is a blog?

   A blog is an online diary or journal which enables anyone to record information. The main page of each blog consists of entries or posts arranged in reverse order with the most recent first. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. From February 2007 there were over 54 million blogs registered with Technorati the gold standard of blog search engines.

   

   How do I set up a blog?

   All you need to set up a blog is a host provider, pick a name template and start posting. We recommend blog hosts Blogger, typepad or wordpress.For more technical minded you can consider server side blogging software which can be downloaded from the Net and installed on a web server of your choice.

   How does it boost your SEO results?

   Generates fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly.

   Categorised content - Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content especially for long phrases and the long tail any number of three or four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.

   Crawlable URLs - Most blog software like wordpress offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

   Building internal links - Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site.

   Excellent inbound link bait - Blogs link freely to each other much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic. Crucially enables you captures long tail search phrase combinations

   Blog Directories and Site Submission Great for one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Google

   Target the long tail searches. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of three or four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

   Example: Top 10 blogs on Technorati as measured by unique links, Feb 07

   

5. Video Search

   What is it?

   Compelling video content is a highly effective marketing tool providing an informative, persuasive and entertaining medium provided it is professionally produced and well presented. With the explosive popularity of video content on the web, savvy search marketers can easily harness a prime growing trend in 2007 by optimising video content to out perform competitors in search engines.

   The top 10 video sharing sites, by market share and session time:

   1. YouTube 59.89 per cent 17:32 minutes
   2. Google Video 16.63 per cent 7:14 minutes
   3. Google Video UK 6.78 per cent 12:45 minutes
   4. MySpace Videos 5.49 per cent 6:25 minutes
   5. MetaCafe 2.90 per cent 10:05 minutes
   6. Yahoo Video 6.78 per cent 12:45 minutes
   7. Daily Motion 1.76 per cent 8:53 minutes
   8. MSN UK Video 1.71 per cent 0:58 minutes
   9. AddictingClips 1.58 per cent 6:13 minutes
   10. AOL Media 1.33 per cent 4:46 minutes

   source: Hitwise Sept 06

   How does video search work?

   Once you have registered your details with a video search engine understand the video submission process and what information is required and try it out.

   Good Video Submission Instructions: http://video.google.co.uk/

   Example: Youtube submission instructions

   

   How to optimise Video content for SEO:

   Applying best practice SEO methods will have a major impact:

   • Add a keyword-rich video title tag and descriptions
   • Optimising not only for content related keywords, but also for generic keywords related to video; News video, ipod video,location-specific video. Even popular terms like "travel video" are still relatively easy to rank for. Now is the time to create a name, a niche, and some rank equity while the field is still fairly open.
   • Creating a separate video site map. The site maps can be submitted to both video and content engines showing off your wealth of video material, and encourage the spiders to come back looking for more content.
   • Use anchor text opportunities
   • Include RSS feeds
   • Bundle your video with a keyword rich synopsis Ñ and transcripts if you have them, you'll capture more spider attention and endear your brand to V-searchers.
   • Popular web 2.0 sites simply gain more links, and naturally rise to the top of many search results. And now that Google has aquired YouTube that trend will likely only increase.
   • Maximise the viral push by adding a prompt-a "send to a friend," "visit this site," or other straight forward call to action.
   • Use popular content or news items by looking at Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

   How does it benefit SEO performance?

   • Video search engines are the fastest growing areas of SEO and still relatively uncompetitive
   • Video is a great content driver. It is viral by nature, and good video can be one of the most effective tools to spread message, brand, product, or campaign far and wide in an instant. Marketers can use video to drive brand recognition, traffic and revenues.
   • Excellent link bait for third party sites to link through to your site.

6. Podcasting

   What is it?

   Podcasting is the recording of an audio recording which can be uploaded to the web so that users with iPods or other media players can download the content. The term is a derived from a combination of Ipod and broadcasting.

   How does it work?

   Podcasts tend to consist of mainly spoken content- anything from debate on current affairs, recipes and poetry readings. Podcast search engines are similar to traditional search engines except that podcast search engines crawl the web constantly for rich media files.

   How does podcasting boost SEO performance?

   • Can be registered with Podcast directories for boosting SEO
   • Used correctly can be a very effective strategy for increasing traffic e.g. Optimised Podcast via iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
   • Enables you to rank content on more advanced search engines like Podscope of Blinx which utilize speech recognition to determine the content of anaudio file.
   • Excellent link bait for third party sites to link through to your site

   Example: The Times Podcast repository

   

7. Vertical Search Engines

   What is it?

   A range of new search engines have emerged out of web 2.0 consisting of search engines that focus on specific niche or specialised markets.Examples would be simplyhired for the recruitment sector or Edmunds.com in the motor sector. While leading search engines such Google, Yahoo!and MSN continue to dominate the consumer search market specialist vertical search engines are emerging as powerful fast growing alternatives to address the particular information needs of nicheaudiences and markets

   How do Vertical search engines work?

   Verticalsearch engines send their spiders out to a highly refined database and indexes specific information about a given vertical. We recommend a well-developed strategy for identifying which relevance third- party sites you are going to target. The performing best vertical search sites are very selective about which they index include evaluating if the site is relevant, credible and does it have high information value to the engine result pages.

   Example below for Simplyhired Home-page

   

   How do Vertical engines boost your SEO and Marketing?

   • Vertical search engines are more relevant and less competitive particularly in the B2B Sector
   • If you Rank on a niche vertical search engine is likely you are reaching a very focused audience who have stronger intent to buy
   • As the cost of advertising on the large search engines increases it is likely to drive more marketers to consider vertical search

Conclusions

• New Social Search and Web 2.0 innovations in 2008 provide fantastic marketing opportunities and ROI to boost natural search performance and traffic.
• Smart companies cannot wait around for someone else to take the lead. The only way to really understand the value of social search strategies is to try them out yourself. Fortunately in most cases this is easy.
• Finally,don't give up! Creating a well-regarded website in the eyes of search engines which incorporates these elements takes time and effort. But the long-term effects of these efforts on your SEO will be valuable and very hard for your competitors to overtake.