2 Ways to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

Social media and search engine optimization are becoming inseparable.   In working with social media for some time now, I am discovering over and over how well it works to gain my business visibility.  In a few short months, I’ve seen my blog go from almost invisible to a site that is gaining a larger number of visitors each and every month.

I often work with clients who want me to get them started in social media. Some of my clients want me to set up only one social network, such as only Facebook or only LinkedIn.  But because of the huge SEO value, I always recommend that they set up a Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube accounts, even if they don’t intend to be active on all four networks. If they decide they don’t want to put as much time on all four acccounts, and only want to update Facebook every week, their other profiles are still going to turn up in search engine results. 

To gain the most value with your social media profiles and make them findable, there are a few basics you want to be sure to include in your profile.

1. Link to your website.  Always include the URL to your website or blog.  If I search for you on Google, and I find your Facebook profile in search results, I know I can go to your Facebook profile and find more information about you. If your URL is in that information, I can easily click on it, come to your website, read more about you, and contact you with the contact information you provide on the site.  This uses social media to drive traffic to your website and ultimately to you.

2. Place keywords in key places on your profile. You probably have keywords you use in your blog or with your website to generate search engine traffic. These same keywords should appear in your profile in areas such as titles, headlines, biographical paragraph, descriptions of your business. Using keywords allows you to control what searches find you and your profiles.

Social media profiles offer more ways for potential customers to find you.  By implementing these basic optimization techniques, you will maximize our impact on search engines and become more visible to searchers.

Do you have your URL on every social media profile you own?

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June Traffic Report

Website visitors                             1417

Facebook Friends                            123

Twitter Followers                             1367

LinkedIn Connections                    219

Email List Members                         535

Inbound links                                   330

The big change in stats this month is the number of email list members. Thank you to all of you who have recently joined our community.  This new portion of the community came aboard during the Social Media Wildfire Telesummit I hosted this month.  This was my first Telesummit, with five social media speakers.  I wasn’t sure how it would go, pulling together all of the detailed organization and technology that is required to host a telesummit. But I was stoked at how fun it all was.  Everything went smoothly and our speakers shared some awesome material. I’ve already listened to the replays again. Each time I listen, I come away with more information than I caught before. 

I’m pleased that most of my stats are rising gradually each month.  I’m finding that our community is highly focused. We all are very interested in social media and how to use it to market our businesses. I know this because when I send out information about a new blog post by email, a really large number of you come over to read the blog. That means you are liking the information I’m sharing. Fantastic!

Are you tracking analytics on our website?

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3 Ways Social Media Works For SEO

Before I started using social media, if I Googled my name, I would find about four listings for  a couple sites where I’d written an article or two, and results from 5K road races I’d run. That was it. Most of the other entries on the page were about other people with my name. One is a doctor.  I wonder if anyone has mistakenly thought I was a doctor. That would be uber cool.

As I opened my business, Tekkbuzz Internet Marketing, I knew, if I was going to have any success as a business, I needed to be found when people Googled my name or the name of my business.  I, of course, started my blog, adding posts each week about social media. I made sure I used keywords in my post titles, such as social media, entrepreneurs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

As a social media consultant, I am active every day on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  I’m even starting to use YouTube (which is a whole other post). 

Now when I Google “Deborah Richmond” or “Tekkbuzz”, I see ELEVEN  PAGES of search results that directly relate to my business and myself.  What are the results showing?  They are showing links to pages of my website, links to specific blog posts I’ve written, to my social media profiles, to guest posts I’ve written for other blogs. The road race results now appear on pages 6 or 7, which is too bad because my results were good!

This is a clear indication that social media is working to make me more visible to search engines.  Now a searcher will find all kinds of information about me and my business.  They will have a very good sense of what I am all about.  And luckily, there are no questionable photos of me and an Elvis impersonator anywhere in the results.

Here are some key ways that using social media helps your search engine optimization:

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links

A successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to your site. Inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.

The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited.

2) Fresh content = more hooks in the water for search

The more content you have on your site, the more traffic you will snag from search engines.   Also fresh content keeps your site updated, which gives users a reason to come back.  People don’t want to visit static sites, we’re already too used to sites being social.

3) The engines like frequently updated sites

Feed those indexes with fresh content and get rewarded with frequent visits by the search spiders.  Search engines love fresh new content. They will see new content in your Facebook stream, LinkedIn profile, Twitter updates and blog posts.  And they will direct traffic to all of those places for you.

When you Google your business name, are you seeing the results you want?  Leave me a comment.

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Tekkbuzz.com Traffic Report

I’ve been developing this website since mid July 2009.  I had already put up a site, but at that time I redesigned it into a blog using Wordpress on my domain.  I added some plugins and began putting up blog posts.  Here is my traffic growth so far.

August 2009                       204 visitors

September 2009               193 visitiors

October 2009                     324 visitors

In September, I had a mishap that broke my site.  I had to rebuild it almost from scratch. That’s why I think September’s numbers are down, because I had a few days where the site was not up.

To drive traffic, I post two to three times a week. Every day I read other  blogs and leave comments on at least three of them. This provides a link back to my site. I’ve set up my blog posts so that they automitically post to Facebook. This provides a link back to my site.

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Google Analytics Dashboard

If you’re thinking of using Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your website, I want to show you what the dashboard will look like.

You see the graph at the top is showing the number of  visitors who are visiting your website over time.  This is a very satisfying number to watch as you work on driving traffic to your site. You can check it every day and see if your efforts are working.

Below are more stats such as overall number of visits.

You can see the average number of pages each visitor viewed.

The bounce rate is the number of people who were on your site for a very very short period of time. This indicates that they discovered your site was not what they were looking for and left quickly.

Page views is different than number of visitors.  If every visitor looks at two pages, then you would have double the number of page views as you have visitors.

Average time on the site tells you how long your visitors are spending looking at your content. It is a good goal to improve your content to that visitors stay longer.

The percentage of new visits indicates how many of your visitors have not been to your site before.  If you’re hoping for return visitors, then you will want to improve content in such a way that people come back again and again.

The graph in the lower portion of the page will tell you where your traffic is coming from. This gives a good indication which of  your traffic-building efforts are working.

This is only the first page of results you will be able to analyze with Google Analytics. This gives you the basics. Google allows you to study some of these factors with more depth on additional pages of the Analytics report.

To use Google Analytics, you will need to copy and paste a piece of code into your site’s html. Go to Google Analytics for more information on how to do so.

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