How to Support SEO With Social Media and Content Marketing

I've worked, on and off, in SEO for over 16 years. It's far from my speciality these days, but I do work for an agency where the core business product is search and I'm often asked what social can do to help. Here's a few suggestions I give the folks in the SEO department when they ask.

NB: Tweeting used to help in getting content indexed. Re-tweets helped it to get indexed quicker. Alas, since Google stopped paying for the full fire hose of Twitters data this no longer appears so (especially if you only get small numbers of RT's). It's still worth doing, but don't hold your breath.

Link Bait

If you create shareable content it'll get passed around, and (more importantly) linked to. Putting the time in to creating video, infographics, audio, a bit of creative meme riding, finding and crafting the right images - content like this is fried gold if you want people to organically link to your posts or site. There's no substitute for the well researched and nicely presented content that pushes your audiences buttons. Embedding that into blog post and into other services promotes sharing and linking.

Link bait

Linking to Channels

For SEO, forget fancy embed codes from the likes of Facebook on your main site (yes, this goes against all the best community building practice, I know. Saying this feels like playing Tie-Fighter after a month of playing X-Wing, just dirty). The Facebook embed code, even if it does promote sign-up by showing your friends who already like a Page, slows a site down so much it's like watching stoned turtles stampede through peanut butter. Go with direct links, above the fold, and a clear 'trawlable' line of access to the social channels. Also, tag them. Putting alt text in place that says the likes of "Follow [blah] on Twitter" is another way to get the brand name in there, and is great accessibility practice.

Get on G+, and Develop Your AuthorRank

Google Plus is getting better. No, really. Not only is it getting more and more usable but Google is making it valuable for search rankings. Posting your blog content here, and actively going about redistributing it by promoting +1's and developing a community is 'where it's at.' How you do that is a whole book in it'self, but starting now with basic set-up and posting is a positive way forwards. Google Plus also seems to promote rapid indexing and trawling, with any 'shares' and '1+s' meaning it's trawled and indexed even quicker.

In the next few years AuthorRank has the potential to become the backbone of credibility. Get your G+ profile linked to your blog content. Now. Start building your reputation. Now. For more on this check my 'Why You Can't Ignore AuthorRank' post from back in January. AuthorRank is like PageRank for individuals, and it's all about 'social signals'. Once you've got your profile linked to your blog you can start to generate credit for the content you create - the 'scoring criteria' runs on factors like 'likes', 'shares', 'retweets', 'comments', '+1s' and the influence of the folks (your followers) doing the sharing. Get this sorted now, you'll thank me for it in 2014. Rel=Author tags are important, and the more you write on a given subject and the more 'love' it gets, the more Auntie Google will pimp your stuff.

Pinterest

In general, Pinterest seems to be good for inbound links. General good practices on Pinterest (adding prices, linking across platforms, filling out the whole profile, fresh content, linking to individual products, categorising boards, adding keywords to descriptions, etc.) seem to be a real boon, and we've got clients that pick up PageRank from being connected to their higher PageRank Pinterest accounts. Every little helps, right?

Write Some Original Quality Content

Not average run-of-the-mill content. Good original content, just like the link bait above. 2-3 fresh posts a week and Google will love you for it - though bigger brands will need to do this a lot more often (probably as much as 2-3 times a daily). Create posts people want to share and link to. Share what you know - remember, you're not giving away information your spreading your knowledge and enhancing your credibility. One blog post that gets shared is worth the time it takes to write 6 blog posts that just sit there gathering social dust. People like to share good useful information from sources they trust that's helped them or they believe will help other people. Often this will be about those common interests and the answer questions they didn't even know they needed an answer to - go take a look at Quora or Yahoo Answers and have a search to see what folks want to know. If it's new, funny, topical, or bordering on the obscure, people love it. Think about working in those compelling (and actionable) calls-to-action and tantalising headlines, and don't cram articles with keywords (those days are gone). Keep your content relevant and accurate, and grow your credibility as an authority. Stimulate debate. Be awesome. Rock your peers. Get writing, but make sure it's decent stuff.

Promote Sharing

If sharing is good for content distribution and you want to up your 'social signals', make sure it's easy for the reader to share (yeah, I know, the theory's hardly rocket science). There's a few good services for this that add all the relevant (the key word here is 'relevant', no one wants to wade through a bazillion icons) social shearing features - try AddThis, ShareThis, or Lockerz - they all do the same thing in different ways.

Also, just as a point, if you spend a few pennies to promote your social posts and get them under the nose of folks who will share it, well that's just good 'white hat' tactics ;)

sharing is good

All this is just scratching the surface. If you want to boost your SEO through distributing content via social media this is a good start. How you get people to do that is another story, but putting the back-bone in place so that they can is an excellent start. Quality and access, that's all it takes.

Why we Can't Ignore AuthorRank, & why That Rocks

Gone are the easy days of the early noughties when the definition of content quality was based more on the 'authority' of a domain than who wrote that content (or it's virility). Google is moving the goal posts, again, and this time it makes sense.

Now it's all about the individual, and (in SEO terms) as individuals that makes our name a commodity. I worked for the Daily Mail in on-line info delivery for 7 years, and if individual contributors don't start making the most of this then it's a crime against journalism. This is a ranking you'll take with you - it doesn't belong to the individual website - and that rocks for original content creators.

Let me try and explain how this works:

Is your name now a killing word?

Authorship, or AuthorRank, is Googles way of examining the importance of a post by the reputation of the individual who wrote it. What does +reputation mean? Prizes. Essentially, justifiably preferential search engine ranking for people who produce good content and who's work has been distributed by others (in the past, or currently) via social signals.

So how do we gather AuthorRank?

Predictably enough we have to start with our Google Plus profile - by adding the blogs, Pages, and channels we contribute too to our profiles and letting the data filter down so that it recognises us. It really is time to stop being scared of giving over our relevant data - get over it, and get in the system. Go to your G+ profile, then go to 'edit' and link the websites you "Contributor to" in the section close to the bottom. You'll be given a code to embed into your posts to set up your 'author rich snippets' - here's a how to - and for businesses (and as individuals) there's a bit a faffing around with "rel=author" and links to G+ pages in footers etc. (doubly so, it seems with Blogger) then you can test it here. With Blogger you can link your G+ and Blogger profiles together (see over on the right) and here's a handy AuthorRank plugin for Wordpress that should see you right.

Content creators (and there's every indication this will soon work for YouTube too) are 'ranked' using a magical Google algorithm based on the 'engagement factors' of the content they produce. This is what we blanketly call 'social signals' and it covers tweets, retweets, comments, shares, likes, +1's, all the usual social malarky. Add to this the stuff we consider Googles typical measurement factors like inbound links etc., and from this it crafts a measurement that it can attribute to an individual to get a sense of their popularity (even, potentially by Circles and Google Communities etc. within a given topic). Presumably the more a content creator creates content on a topic, plus the more engagement with that content, the higher that persons rank is going to be for that topic. In this case specialisation seems like it might be a plus - it's always worked for insects.

Blogger identity is important.

This has the possibility to change the content landscape and shift the balance of power into the hands of the creator. Suddenly brands and marketeers are going to have to court authors. Specialists are going to have (SEO) value and search engine kudos within their chosen areas, and magazine brands will have to seek out the folks with strong AuthorRank to boost their reputation and flagging rankings. It's nice to think that journalists, writers, and content creators who have authority in a topic are going to find themselves a commodity in the very near future. Any companies who want to be seen as specialists and industry leaders - and it's a goal for many when we're creating online marketing strategy - are going to have to conduct 'author outreach' for their short-term content creation, and they'll need to boost and cultivate the AuthorRank of those who are already writing for their organisation to make the most of them in the long term (and don't forget, they'll take that individual rep with them if they leave). Very interesting.

In the immediate future it looks like outreach to find people who have AuthorRank on a given topic should be relatively easy. All we need to do is run a search on any relevant keywords and see what rich snippets show up and who they are attributable to. Right now, each of these has a grey line of info next to them saying how many Circles these folks are in. To begin with, in the absence of any proper tools for automating this research, it's a good start. Right now, these are the people you want writing your guest posts and these are the folks you'll need to contact and schmooze.

The hard working author in his natural habitat.

It's a great time for content creators, and in the future there's the potential for us to be paid - if they smooth out all this adding codes and messing about for the layman - to write on the things we have a passion for and a talent for. Though admittedly the origins of this were seeded back in 2011 - at least some good shit came out of 'Penguin' and 'Panda'. Google is fostering creativity here, and I'm feelin' this bodes well for the future of brand journalism, content marketing, and people with passion and talent.

Nice one Google. That rocks.