Embracing Google+ should be on your short list of activities.

Experts continue to debate whether Google+ has the power to last beyond Google’s previous attempts at entering the social networking realm.

But one thing is clear: Google+ is making its presence known in Google search results now.

Here are some ways you can ensure that your Google+ usage will help with your search rankings.

#1: Get More Followers

This may go against everything you believe about social media and how it’s not supposed to be a numbers game, but rather a matter of quality versus quantity.

When it comes to using Google+ for search ranking benefits, you’ll want quantity in the form of as many followers as possible.

Why? Let’s look at some search results.

Rankings When Following My Personal Account

When someone who is following my personal account on Google+ searches for “freelance writer,” my portfolio site comes up #4 in search results because I have shared the link to it on my Google+ profile.

When someone not logged into Google+ searches for “freelance writer,” my portfolio site comes up #20 on the second page of search results. As most of you know, someone on the first page is much more likely to get traffic than on the second page or beyond.

This is a quick analysis of each of my favorite keywords, including the global search volume estimated by Google AdWords Keyword Tool, number of results in Google, difficulty to rank percentage by SEOmoz and how my sites rank for them in search results for someone who is following my personal profile on Google+ versus when someone is not logged into Google+.

Rankings When Following My Google+ Page

Now let’s look at what happens when someone following the Google+ page for my blog (but not following my personal Google+ profile) searches for the same keywords compared to someone who is not logged into Google+.

Since I don’t link to my freelance portfolio from my blog’s Google+ page, there is no change in search position. But you can see that although the rankings are not as good as when someone is following my personal Google+ profile, pages from my blog still rank higher for particular keywords when someone is following my Google+ page.

How to Get More Google+ Followers

So now that you can see the benefits of having people follow you on Google+, you will probably want to grow your Google+ following. The best ways to do this are as follows.

• Leverage your current following on other social networks by sharing your Google+ profile and/or page link with them to connect.
• Put a link to your Google+ profile and/or web page on your website.
• Put a link to your Google+ profile and/or web page anywhere it is allowed, including forum profiles, other social media profiles and email signatures.
• Link to your Google+ profile and/or page when you comment on blogs.
• Add a Google+ badge to your website.

#2: Set Up Authorship With Your Personal Profile

Google+ now offers a way for you to really stand out in search results by claiming authorship for articles you have written. This is something that is showing up in search results, even when people are not logged into Google+.

If someone is logged into Google+, they will get the option to add the author to their circles directly from search results.

So how do you get your blog posts to show up with your name displayed in the search results? The directions from Google+ are listed in their explanation of author information in search results.

There are two options for adding the authorship connection from your blog posts to your Google+ profile. The first is to add your email address on each page of your content (recommended for multi-author blogs) and have that email address listed in your Google+ profile.

Alternatively, you can also link your content to your Google+ profile and vice versa. When linking your content to your Google+ profile (in an author bio box, for example), you will need to format your URL as follows.

Replace the [profile_url] with your full Google+ URL. Mine looks like this.

Then you will add your blog URL to your Google+ profile under the “Contributor To” section.

After you have set up either approach to authorship (email or linking your content to your Google+ profile), then you can fill out the authorship request form to let Google know that you have completed the directions.

Authorship Examples

If you’re having trouble getting your authorship connected, try following the lead of these authors. They don’t have it set up quite the way Google suggests, but it seems to work anyway.

• Ben Parr has a link to his Google+ profile in his author page on Mashable and a link to his author page on his Google+ profile under the “Other Profiles” section.
• Danny Sullivan has a link to his Google+ profile in his personal blog’s sidebar and a link to his author page on his Google+ profile under the “Other Profiles” section.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick has a link to his Google+ profile on his author page on ReadWriteWeb and a link to ReadWriteWeb on his Google+ profile under the “Recommended Links” section.
• Adam Dachis has a link to his Google+ profile on his author page on LifeHacker with no link to LifeHacker on his Google+ profile.

I have tried putting my Google+ profile link to and from my blog. For a while, my authorship was showing in Google search results, but it has disappeared in the last week or two. Not sure why it changed, but I am still attempting to make it work.

#3: Directly Connect Your Page

Be sure to directly connect your Google+ page to your website. You can add a simple piece of code to your page that no one will see on your website or you can add a Google+ badge which, as mentioned earlier, can help you get followers for your page.

By doing so, you are connecting your Google+ page to your website in a way that could help you dominate search results, as can be seen in this search for Toyota.

By using the Google+ icon on their page, they have now incorporated their latest Google+ activity right below their place in search. You can even add Toyota’s page directly to your circles from the search results.

This could also be a great help to businesses that have some online reputation management issues, such as less-than-desirable reviews or other content ranking on the first page directly beneath their website. The Google+ page activity could easily push those kind of results further down the page where they are less likely to be viewed.

#4: Encourage +1′s

Do you have a +1 button on your website? The +1 button is Google’s much more powerful answer to the Facebook Like button because the number of +1′s a page gets will show up in search results, even if a searcher is not logged into Google+.

Imagine you were looking for something you didn’t know much about, like a blogging platform. Which platform out of this group would look the most popular?

Be sure to get the latest +1 button code from Google and install it on both your individual pages and your main home page. It is the best social proof you can have in Google search results. Even if you’re not worried about the number of +1′s shown in search results, remember that the +1 button also allows others to easily share a link on your website on their Google+ profile!

#5: Fill Out Your Information

Last but not least, be sure to fill in the information for your profile and pages completely. Google prioritizes different areas of the profile for both on-page optimization and in search results.

Also note how the first 55 characters of your Introduction are important for search results within Google+ itself.

A great first impression here could mean the difference between someone selecting your profile or another from inside the Google+ results!

Has Google+ Helped Your Search Rankings?

Have you seen an impact from Google+ in terms of your search rankings? What other ways have you seen Google+ find its way into search results? Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comments!

Brian talks about how social media and search engine optimization (SEO) go well together.

You’ll find out why smart SEO pros participate in social media and how social media can send traffic to your website and improve your website ranking.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to use content to build businesses
• Why you need to do a lot more giving and a lot less selling
• Understand what people want, focus on giving it to them and understand you’ll achieve your goals on the back side of that
• Why you need to write “cornerstone content” to provide value to your audience
• How social media can bring traffic to your website 

You’ll also hear how Brian merged four companies to create Copyblogger Media. Check out Copyblogger and the Copyblogger radio show. And connect with Brian on Twitter @copyblogger and on Facebook.

What are your thoughts? What SEO tips do you have to share? Please leave them below.

Keep reading to find out.

A bit of history

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Udi Manber, Google’s head of search, said that Google will make as many as 550 changes to its search algorithm this year. One of the bigger changes happened this past winter in what has been called the Panda or Farmer update.

According to a report by Sistrix.com, within days of the update, a number of very large websites saw their Google rankings take a drastic drop. Sites such as Ezinearticles.com and Suite101.com lost 90% or more of their visibility on Google.

This Sistrix table shows the domain and the percentage loss since Google's change.

Although a 90% drop in visibility may seem extreme, it was a direct result of Google’s attempts to weed out content farms (websites with high-volume, low-quality content) and those trying to game the system. In the process, a number of unsuspecting websites got caught in the fray.

For the average small business owner, stories like this can be concerning. It’s hard enough to move to the top of the Google search rankings, let alone keep up with the constantly evolving magic that makes Google work.

However, for those looking to build quality websites that achieve high Google search results, nothing has really changed. As always, the key is to focus on publishing high-quality content that readers will want to share.

Here are 7 tips to help your business move to the top of the Google search rankings.

#1: It’s all about the user

It’s important to remember that the reason for the continually changing algorithms and updates is that Google has one objective—to provide the highest quality, most relevant search results possible. If they fail to do so, competitors such as Bing and Facebook are nipping at their heels ready to take up the slack.

Google is not out to penalize websites or hurt website owners. They want to ensure that users find the information they seek on the first try.

When it comes to search engine rankings and improving SEO, start by looking at the site from the perspective of the user searching Google. Does your site provide the best, most relevant information for a given search term and if not, what can you do to fix it?

Google’s Amit Singhal, head of Google’s core ranking team, provided 23 questions to consider when evaluating web content. These are some of the same questions that Google is using to test algorithms and evaluate websites using third-party beta testers. The questions provide an excellent insight into Google’s perspective and a tool to analyze your website from the user’s point of view.

#2: Content: Focus on quality over quantity

In an earlier post I wrote on how to increase your Google ranking, I talked about using blogs to increase the number of pages indexed in Google. And while it still holds true that more pages indexed for a given search term gives you a better chance of achieving a high Google rank, it isn’t enough just to publish text optimized for keywords. The quality of the content is now a factor.

Using the list of 23 questions will help you assess the quality of your content.

Since the Panda update, Google has attempted to screen out those publishing high-volume, low-quality content. Now, in the eyes of Google, it’s better to have fewer high-quality pages then lots of low-quality pages.

Blogging is still one of the best ways to move up the search engine rankings as it is a good way to add high-quality information to a website. However, web pages or blog posts offering little of value can now negatively impact a website. Removing these pages might actually help a website move up the rankings or recover from a drop in ranking.

#3: Links: Focus on quality over quantity

Incoming links have always looked good in the eyes of Google. As a result, one way to move a site up the search engine rankings was to generate a high number of incoming links all pointing to a given web page.

As Google places higher and higher value on the quality of the content, this tactic is not as effective, and can even harm a website’s ranking if overdone.

For the small business website owner, this should come as good news. Instead of generating 50 articles with subpar content, website owners can now focus on creating fewer high-quality articles or incoming links, as Google is no longer placing much value in links from article distribution sites such as Ezine.com.

In another article on ways to improve your blog SEO with inbound links, I suggested that press releases were a good way to generate incoming links because distribution services often generated back-links as articles were placed on various press release syndication websites. This link-building strategy has also changed post-Panda update, as these links are not as highly valued as they once were. However, a well-written press release can still be very effective when picked up and reported by a journalist or major publication.

Focus on getting high-quality links from high-quality websites. Guest posting is still an excellent way to generate high-quality incoming links. If possible, try to wrap links in important keywords. For example, as a content marketing copywriter, a link around “content marketing copywriter” would be more effective than a link wrapped around my name.

#4: Make the most of social media, social sharing and social search

It’s hard to tell exactly how much impact Twitter and Facebook have on Google search results, but at the very least we know that Google is providing real-time social sharing in the search results.

Google’s addition of the Google +1 button and the ability of Google users to block sites take this a step further. Although it’s still unclear how Google is using the +1 button in their algorithms, they have stated publicly that users blocking a site can have a negative impact on returns. This again demonstrates the importance of high-quality content.

If you don't have the +1 button but want to try it out, you can enroll in Google's experiment.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c

#5: Let the search engines know you’re there

Once you’ve published high-quality content, it’s important to tell Google about the content and make it easy for users to find. This means that meta titles and descriptions should closely match the content on the page.

Keyword stuffing and intentionally filling meta descriptions with keywords that don’t match the page in an attempt to deceive will only hurt your search engine results. The closer the match, the better.

It’s also important to make the most of the SERP, the short paragraph showing in the Google search returns. Use this space to provide a clear description of the content and encourage users to click through to your site.

Be sure your meta description matches the post and encourages users to click through. This is what shows in the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

#6: The truth behind duplicate content

It’s not that Google penalizes websites for duplicate content; Google just doesn’t show it in the search results. Remember what I said in the beginning about providing the best possible search returns. When it comes to duplicate content, that’s all Google is doing.

Instead of showing 20 pages with the same content, Google tries to present the most relevant and original content and omit the rest. Users can still view omitted search returns, they just need to make an effort and most won’t.

This only becomes a problem if you’re using canned content or directly publishing RSS feeds from other websites. Content of this sort might be seen as low-quality and result in lower Google returns. Hopefully the days of stolen web content and RSS scrapers will soon be a thing of the past.

#7: Don’t overdo the advertising

Too much advertising can also result in lower Google rankings. This again is a result of Google’s attempts to improve search results for the user. Google tends to equate an overabundance of advertising to lower-quality or “spam” websites.

Excessive advertising can also hurt your Google returns. Note how the actual content on this site isn't even visible above the fold. This website is also "scraping" content from Social Media Examiner which can also hurt search engine ranking.

Be sure that advertising does not interfere with the content on the page. This is especially important with advertising above the fold and within the text.

Google is constantly evolving, but the fundamentals of SEO will always remain the same. High-quality content that people want to share will always do well in the eyes of Google. Search Engine Land has put together a free guide that will help you gain traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing.

"Search Engine Land has created a Periodic Table of 'SEO Ranking Factors.' Notice the importance placed on content.

What do you think? What other ideas or suggestions do you have? Leave your comments in the box below.

Why is blogging so important to your search engine visibility? Because search engines serve up web pages—not websites—when people ask a question. And here’s the important part:

Every blog post is a new web page and every web page is another opportunity to rank well for another search term.

More groundbreaking than E=mc2!

In other words, every time you blog on a subject you want to rank well for, you create another opportunity for your best prospects to find you.

What You Need to Get Started

There are three things required for you to succeed in your business blogging:

• Use the right blogging platform. While I don’t believe that you can’t succeed using platforms such as Joomla, Drupal or TypePad, my recommendation for blogging is WordPress. It’s powerful, easy to learn and has plenty of SEO plugins that increase your chances of topping the search engine results.
• Own your domain. Don’t run a business blog from an address like mycompany.typepad.com or mycompany.wordpress.com. When you do that, you’re just building up trust and inbound links to someone else’s property. You want to blog from your own property, such as mycompany.com/blog or mycompanyblog.com. This is also critical in case you ever decide to move to another blogging platform as it allows you to retain all the inbound links you’ve gathered over the years.
• Be committed. Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight; it’s not like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising where you can immediately appear on the first page of Google. However, it also lasts a lot longer. PPC ends the day you stop paying, while my company has blog posts written years ago that still deliver hundreds of new leads each month. That’s great ROI!

Posts from as far back as 2006 still drive thousands of new visitors each month to our company blog.

What Affects Your Search Engine Ranking?

All search engines have a unique algorithm for determining how relevant your blog post is to a given query. To oversimplify this process, it comes down to two main factors:

• On-page optimization: how the words in your post match up with the search that was just done, and
• Off-page optimization: how many quality inbound links you have (links from other websites, blogs, directories, etc. to your blog post)

How to Improve Your On-Page Optimization

If you want to create content that’s relevant to your business, answers your prospects’ questions and helps you rank higher, there’s a simple three-step process to help you get there:

1.     Brainstorm your keyword phrases. Whether you do this by yourself, include co-workers or survey your current clients, you should start by brainstorming as many keyword phrases—the words you want to rank well for or you believe your prospects are searching for—as you can.

2.     Test your beliefs. Too often we think we know what our prospects are searching for, but we’re off the mark. If you’re blogging about divorce lawyers and everyone out there is searching for how to save my marriage, you’re not helping anyone.

You’ll want to use keyword analysis tools like Raven Tools, Keyword Discovery or Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help you determine what people are searching.

All of these tools work in a similar fashion: they determine how many people are searching for your phrases, and how much competition you have for each phrase. You want to first target the phrases that have good search volume, but maybe don’t have as much competition.

Bacon queries at Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The keyword phrases most likely to bring home the bacon for your business. #groan

3.     Start blogging! Running sneakers gathering dust in your closet don’t make you fit, and keywords you’re not using won’t get you good rankings. Start creating new blog posts of 300–700 words 2–3 times a week.

Blogging for Search Engine Success

While knowing what keywords to target is half the battle, here are a few tips to maximize your results:

• Start your post title with your best keywords. Page titles are the most important variable in how well you’ll rank. Search engines give more weight to the first three or four words in your title, so you’ll get better results from titling your post Super Bowl Commercial Reviews: The Best and Worst Ads, as opposed to What I Thought of Last Night’s Super Bowl Ads.
• Use your keyword phrase through the body of the post. Try to use your phrase in the first sentence or two, and then a couple of more times in the post. Put it in your meta-description, the meta-tags, the image alt-tags, the post tags and anywhere else that seems appropriate.
• Link to appropriate pages on your website. If you’re blogging about the boots some B-list celebrity wore on some reality show last night, make sure you link the boot name to the page on your website where they can buy those boots. If you’re blogging about how to retain employees, make sure you link “employee recognition” to your page on employee reward programs. This will help increase the search visibility of your web pages; just make sure you link your keywords, not “click here” or “learn more.”

E-commerce sites can benefit from blogging around their customers' interests.

SEO Tools and Plugins

Here are a few tools to help you create posts that will rank well and attract qualified clients to your blog:

Keyword Questions: Struggling with blogger’s block? This tool from WordTracker returns popular search engine queries based on your keywords.

Each result is another post for your blog.

All In One SEO Pack: One of many plugins that improve your blog’s optimization, this is the one I use on my own web marketing blog. This plugin allows you to easily add unique meta-descriptions, meta-tags and titles to each post, improve the page title format and reduce the chances that the search engines will get confused by duplicate content on your blog.

Use SEO plugins to improve your titles and meta-information.

Scribe SEO: Scribe is a plugin for WordPress that requires a monthly fee. Once installed, you can run keyword analysis on each post from directly within the admin. Scribe will also score your blog post before you post it, and suggest improvements.

Scribe shows you where you can improve.

It will also suggest other blog posts and social media resources that may be sources of inbound links to your post.

Off-Page Optimization

As mentioned earlier, the other half of the search engine equation is inbound links: links from other web pages to your blog posts.

Search engines see inbound links as “votes of confidence.” The more quality incoming links, the more confidence that the search engines have that you’re providing a valuable resource to their searchers.

Not all inbound links are created equal, however. There are a number of variables that affect how important each link is.

• The linking site: sites deemed trustworthy will provide more value than new or untrustworthy sites.
• The number of links on the referring page: each page has a limited amount of “link juice” to pass on. If you cut a pie into four pieces, everyone gets a good-sized piece of pie. If you cut that pie into four hundred pieces, everyone goes home hungry.
• The context of the linking page: If you’re blogging about burritos, a link from a taco blog will give you a bigger boost than one from a bicycle blog, all other things being equal.
• The anchor text: the words in the link are critical.

Admittedly, you often won’t have any control over these variables, but Google and Bing take them into consideration. Which begs the question…

How Do You Get More Incoming Links?

Ah, I thought you’d never ask. The obvious—and aggravating—answer is create quality content that’s valuable to your audience. If people find your content valuable, they’ll share it and link to it.

That being said, here are some techniques for getting more inbound links:

• Numbered lists: People love numbered lists. We don’t have time to master any new skills here, but you can boil it down to 6 Tips for Starting an Online Community, 21 Ways Non-Profits Can Leverage Social Media, or 50 Creative Uses of QR Codes in Marketing & Communications.
• How-to articles: Most of us use the search engines because we don’t know how to accomplish some goal or task. Get even more links by embedding a video in your how-to post.

Videos make how-to posts even more link-worthy.

• Guest blog: Blog at a related blog—bonus points if it’s more well-read and influential than your own! From your guest post you can create keyword-rich links to your blog or website. If you’re not sure where to start your guest blogging, check out My Blog Guest, a marketplace for guest blogging.

In conclusion:

• Perform a keyword analysis to know which keywords will drive qualified traffic to your site.
• Put your keywords in your titles, content and throughout your post.
• Create content that will encourage people to link to your blog.

This post just skimmed the surface of what you can do to improve your search engine visibility and drive more qualified traffic to your blog. What techniques and successes have you had with your blog and search engines? Please share your stories in the comments box below!

As enticing as the saying is, “If you build it, they will come,” we all know that just because we build a social media presence, people don’t magically start knocking down our door.

Instead, we need to encourage people to come to our social pages and once they’re there, we have to create enough value for them to hang around. And through these repeated exchanges, casual users can become regular visitors as well as valuable leads.

In previous posts, I’ve written A-Z guides to help create the absolute best presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. Now let’s turn our attention to harnessing the power of those efforts for lead generation.

#1: Assets

As part of your social media marketing plan, Michelle deHaaff suggests that companies examine social media and online assets to see what they can leverage for full social media engagement. She identifies seven key assets: location, people, stories, images, video, audio and words to help us think about engaging more fully.

#2: Brand Message

Ethan Lyon suggests that users want to identify with a brand. He offers Nike’s identity as an example, “Customers buy Nike because the brand gives them the confidence to succeed—much like an effective coach.” What is your brand message? What should users know about you? Can they tell that from what you’re posting?

#3: Compelling Messages

Use compelling messages throughout your communications. Craft messages that users can relate to and won’t be able to resist. These are generally the messages that speak like real people and not marketing spin. Below is an example from Pogue’s Post.

David Pogue uses a conversational tone and a bit of humor to drive home a point from Pogue's Post.

#4: Differentiations

Because there’s a tremendous amount of competition vying for consumers’ attention in the social media arena, businesses that can differentiate themselves will stand out and get noticed. Zappos Service Twitter page shows how to make it friendly and feel like you’re hanging out with a good friend. Create remarkable content.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=8364&message=1

Zappos employees tell you when they're signing off and when they're leaving for the night.

#5: Etiquette

Michelle Golden recommends in her book Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms to practice good etiquette. “Definitely don’t write about and link only to your stuff. Instead, go out of your way to promote others liberally.”

#6: Feedback

Users who write comments and ask questions appreciate receiving feedback. Make it a regular practice to take time to respond.

A fan poses a question on Social Media Examiner's Facebook page and Cindy King responds with a timely answer and directs the fan to a link.

#7: Google

Remember that the social media updates you post via your blog, Facebook page, tweets and YouTube channel appear in search results, too. The person searching is an active user looking for information, and bringing the user to your pages is an excellent way to get in front of potential customers.

A person looking for sources for how to choose a paint color would find blog posts and videos. This person is looking for help and the companies have provided advice and solutions. The companies have found ways to get in front of potential customers.

#8: Help a Reporter Out

Companies are often looking for ways to share experiences that might be referenced in blog posts and articles. You don’t have to be a big company to get picked up for a story.

Sign up for Help a Reporter Out and when you have a story to share on a topic, offer the information to the reporter. HARO is one good way to spread information and get high-quality, free publicity for your business. Keep your eyes open for other ways to distribute information about your business with social media press releases.

HARO serves as a vital social networking resource for sources, reporters and advertisers.

#9: Icons

Social media icons help users share your content and offer ways for people to like your content. Likes are valuable votes of confidence and go a long way with users who may have come to your site for the first time. Make your content easy to share.

#10: Joy

In Guy Kawasaki’s new book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, he tells us that achieving trustworthiness will go a long way for a business. People want to do business with companies and people they can trust. And sometimes it means that we may end up giving our time or some kind of service that we’re not compensated for. Guy suggests that we give with joy.

#11: Knowledge-sharing

Share your knowledge freely in blog posts and white papers. Some businesses are afraid they’ll give away all of their secrets. Your knowledge is a valuable asset; don’t be afraid to share what you know.

HubSpot's inbound Internet marketing blog regularly shares the blogger's personal experiences in marketing and is very generous about sharing tips.

#12: Leverage Content Products

Jeff Bullas recommends using 7 content products for marketing: social media, e-newsletters, blogs, white papers, article marketing, case studies and online videos.

Use a good mix of content, because not all users will read a case study or watch an online video. You’ll increase your odds of being seen by more people by using a mix of content products.

#13: Monitor Conversations

Monitor conversations about your brand and competitors. There are many social media listening tools that will help you keep a pulse on what’s being talked about. The more you know, the more responsive you can be.

#14: Nobodies Are the New Somebodies

One of the most serious mistakes we can make is to pass up a potential lead because we don’t perceive the company or person to be a valuable lead. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Nobodies are the new somebodies in the world of wide-open communications.” Treat everyone with the same attention and respect.

#15: Offline Skills

Online skills don’t have to be inherently different than the way we act offline. Erica Swallow suggests that we use our offline skills and go out there and “Meet people, communicate and build relationships… Be genuine, track conversations and respond to inquiries promptly and thoroughly.”

#16: Produce Content

Not only do we have to produce content, we also have to produce enough of it. HubSpot provides some interesting recommendations: “Businesses must produce enough content for their blog to kick off growth in leads, which starts with about 24 to 51 posts.” HubSpot found that more indexed pages on Google also translate to more leads. They suggest that every 50 to 100 incremental indexed pages can mean double-digit lead growth.

#17: Questions

Lisa Barone recommends that social media marketers should “answer questions because they’re a good way to establish your authority, but also for people to ‘test’ you out.”

#18: Relationships

Lisa Barone also suggests that “social media is an emerging lead generation tool because it lowers the barrier to the sale by building relationships, displaying expertise and through networking you’re able to bring in more people than cold calling ever could.”

#19: Showcase Your Experience

According to Erica Swallow, “The first step to engaging a community of potential customers is sharing content that showcases your expertise. A simple social media update usually isn’t enough to convey a full analysis on a topic. Include links with your updates that expand on key ideas. Keep in mind that your goal is to create value for your followers. Learn what your fans respond to and what they don’t, and then adjust your updates based on that information.”

#20: Target Personas

Buyer personas have been around long before social media hit our radar screens, but marketers have found that having a good picture in mind of the target customer is beneficial in terms of how we write our content.

A blog, for example, can have multiple categories of topics and so you may find that certain categories speak more to certain personas than others. And certain Facebook and Twitter updates may appeal to certain users.

Regardless of how you segment these groups, it’s incredibly beneficial to share target persona information with whoever is developing content for your social media channels.

Before writing, review your persona list to remind yourself whom you're conversing with.

#21: Useful Content

Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, says that if our content isn’t supporting the successful fulfillment of our business objectives or our users’ top goals, then it’s a waste of pixels. She suggests adding two columns to a content inventory: value to user and value to business.

#22: Value

Guy Kawasaki says there are three types of value: 1) pointers to useful, inspiring or entertaining content, 2) personal insights, observations or content, 3) advice and assistance. Guy’s recommendation is to pass along these gems to friends and followers to help them derive more value from online resources.

#23: Word of Mouth

The Marqui Web Marketing Blog’s post 6 Ways Social Media Marketing Helps B2B Lead Generation says, “Word of mouth has been, and continues to be, one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. Buyers tend to trust peer referrals more than any other source of information and since social media allows people to share their experiences (both good and bad) with a wide range of people, this can help increase trust in your company’s products and services.”

#24: Excellence

The Network Singularity blog says “there are 5 C’s to social media excellence: coordination of social media activities, commitment means engaging with your environment and deliberately pursuing social interactions, confidence in your social media activities, comprehension of social media, and cultivation of worthwhile and friendly relationships.”

#25: Yes

Being likable on social media enhances our potential for lead generation. Guy Kawasaki says one way to become likable is to “adopt a yes attitude. This means your default response to people’s requests is yes… By contrast, a no response stops everything… To make a default yes work, you must assume people are reasonable, honest and grateful.”

#26: Zeal

Enthusiasm is contagious. By showing the fervor you have for your business, products and services, and through the content you share on your social media channels, users will be inclined to want to stick around, engage and build a relationship. Reach out and show your enthusiasm.

What ways have you generated leads with social media? What would you add to this list? Leave your comments in the box below.

If you’re looking for a social media monitoring tool, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quickly becoming a confusing landscape. For those who are new to social media and looking for tools to manage their presence, it’s difficult to know how to compare one vendor to the next. Here’s the skinny on where Radian6 fits into the picture.

Where does Radian6 fit into the social media measurement landscape?

Radian6 helps brands ensure that no post is missed.

We offer unequalled coverage of the social web and provide metrics to measure what is being said, and by whom. —David Alston, CMO Radian6.

Primarily, Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It can help you monitor brand mentions across the social landscape and the new Engagement Console offers you an end-to-end presence management tool.

Radian6 Dashboards

For consideration: Think about how much “noise” you have in your space. In order for monitoring to be actionable you want to keep in mind that for industries and brands that are targets for spammers it can take a considerable amount of work to filter and find the “meaningful” conversations. I experienced this problem myself, as CareOne and the entire debt relief industry are hounded by spammers and it required intervention from Radian6 to get it in line.

Tip: Many people start by putting in keywords that are used in SEO and paid search. To narrow your results, sort them by comment count. Because comments indicate more engagement, it’s more likely that the conversations are meaningful. Look for other words that are used frequently with your keywords and add them as modifiers to narrow your results to conversations, rather than spam bots.

The Engagement Console is a real-time social web client—more complete than Twitter.

What are Radian6′s greatest strengths?

“Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of discussions on the social web, covering hundreds of millions of blogs, comments, the public Facebook API and the full Twitter firehose. In addition to this coverage, Radian6 is scalable within an enterprise, allowing online comments to be assigned within the business, to customer service, sales, marketing and so forth. Radian6 also integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.” —David Alston

You can scour more than 150 million public sites and sources including blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news publications, public photos and videos.

In the landscape of monitoring tools, while competitors are on the rise, Radian6 has had a very comfortable and secure position in the market. I think this is because of two things. First, they entered the market early and got popular social media bloggers to test them out and recommend them. Second, they quickly gained popularity among enterprise organizations with big brand names as being the go-to choice.

For consideration: Radian6 is a very comprehensive tool that gives you a one-stop shop for engaging on your social channels. The workflow aspect is a key consideration for enterprise-level organizations. However, for smaller businesses or teams with one or two people it may be overkill. Additionally, their pricing model can get expensive quickly for larger teams. It starts at $1k+ per month.

Tip: Take advantage of the free tools out there for a while. See what you like best about them and see what they’re lacking. Create a list of absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves. When you’re looking at different providers you can use this checklist to make sure they have what you need. Anything they’re offering that isn’t on your absolute must-have or nice-to-have lists will likely end up being an unused feature.

If Radian6 is integrated with Salesforce, Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics, can they provide ROI data?

The short answer is no. Based on the integration David described to me, there’s no way to follow the conversation back to the revenue. The integration was mostly done from a customer service perspective.

“For Salesforce, it’s designed in such a way that, for example, if you find a customer service issue in Radian6, you can link the record of what you find in Radian6 back to the customer record. In terms of Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture, you can create an XML report of the 10 terms that get captured in Webtrends that you want to import into Radian6. You can then overlay the Webtrend data on those keywords with the information inside Radian6 and do kind of a pivot to sort by items like time on site.” —David Alston

For consideration: The level of conversion tracking was described by Alston as items like lead forms that are set up as goals within your web tracking software. In my experience, this type of conversion data is nice but unless it was an online sale it doesn’t attach to revenue.

Tip: While Radian6 doesn’t provide ROI data within its interface, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to it through other channels. You may need to work with a consultant who can help you quickly identify where to connect the pieces to get to revenue.

What are Radian6′s biggest weaknesses?

There are a several things that I think Radian6 could do better.

Up-front Effort for Workflow Features

From a workflow perspective, it’s great to be able to assign tasks and tags to posts; however, to be effective, you need to create a system of tagging up front or you’ll end up with a large clean-up effort later. It was a great improvement when they released the Engagement Console which allows you to write macros. This cuts down significantly on the number of clicks it takes to assign a post and tag it. But it does take a lot of forethought and setup to get that working well.

David acknowledges that this can be a challenge.

“Because the Engagement Console was designed to optimize usage in a team environment, it requires users to think through the tagging, classification and macro systems they would like to use in advance. This takes an investment to create (we call it a “playbook”), but it’s definitely worth it once it has been set up. The latest addition of administrative functionality in the Engagement Console means a single super-user can help pull this all together for the team, thus saving more time.”

Two Interfaces

As a user you’ll find that there are two interfaces for you to use. The Engagement Console is where you manage your social media channels, tag posts, assign them and so on. I liken it to your HootSuite or TweetDeck interface on steroids. This is what you’ll likely use every day. Then you have the Radian6 dashboard which aggregates all of your stats into pretty little charts and you can get data based on specific timeframes.

I found it awkward that the Radian6 dashboard is web-based and the Engagement Console is a desktop app. I would have preferred to have them both as web apps.

No Smart Phone App

For those who manage their presence on the go, there’s one big missing piece of the puzzle. You can’t use Radian6 on a smart phone because there is no app. I asked David about this and he said to “stay tuned” but I’ve been hearing that for over a year now so I’m becoming a little skeptical on their ability to make it happen in the short-term. If I were at Radian6, this would be my top priority. For users, it creates a disconnect from presence management and forces us to use other tools on our phones.

I’d rather look for all of my stats on my smart phone, and using the Engagement Console means I have to get reporting in two locations, which is not my preference.

Pricing

There are three fees. One is a per-seat license. The second is a per–topic profile fee. A topic profile is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. An agency managing multiple clients would need at least one topic profile per client and it’s the most expensive item on the list. The third fee is based upon the volume of posts that come into your topic profile.

While the initial volume range that comes with your topic profile is reasonably high, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can exceed it. You can use keyword refinement to bring this down. These are all monthly fees that make up your core price. While I think Radian6 is certainly the Cadillac in the space and their price indicates that, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the money.

Summary

Radian6 is a great platform that’s equipped with a lot of bells and whistles. From my perspective, it was clear the company is dedicated to continual innovation of the tools. To decide if it’s right for you, you’ll need to look at your list of absolute must-have and nice-to-have features and see if buying the “whole farm” makes sense for your organization. My feeling is that for most one- or two-person operations it may be a little overkill and pricey, but for corporate marketing teams I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Read these posts for more on measuring social media and its impact on brand awareness, looking to track social media metrics and 5 ways to use social data to grow your business.

What do you think? Are you a Radian6 user? If so, what would you add to the list of strengths? How about weaknesses? Did you switch from Radian6 to another tool? If so, which one did you pick and why? Please join the conversation and leave a comment in the box below.

What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, related to the craft of blog writing and a number of critical factors that will help to ensure the production of high-quality posts.

#1: Attribution

“Links are the currency of the web,” writes Jonathan Bailey. “If you use someone else’s content, whether licensed directly or through fair use, it’s important to be sure to provide a clickable link to the original site if at all possible. This not only helps visitors to your site find the original work, but it also provides SEO benefits for the creator of the content and guards against your site being mistaken by the search engines as the original work.”

#2: Blog as Hub

Not long ago, the company website served as the communication hub for an organization. Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman write in their recent book, Content Rules, How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business, “A Blog can serve as your online home base or hub for content, including posts you write, curated content you pull together, press mentions, and content created about your organization elsewhere that you want to share.”

"A blog can become the central location through which you can share your thoughts, words, and ideas with the world."—Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman

#3: Comments

One of the distinguishing features of blogs from earlier websites is the ability to leave comments. As Stan Shroeder writes on Mashable, “At their core, [blogs] are about two-way communication; a blog is simply not a blog without comments.”

Lisa Barone suggests, “Having comments open on your blog is a bit like sitting on your front porch in the evening. It lets people know you’re home and invites them to stop over if they want to talk. People can interact when they have something to say and they become active members of what you’re building.” She offers insights too about how to deal with spam and moderate comments.

#4: Disclosure

Bloggers need to comply with the FTC’s December 2009 policy on disclosures, which mandates that bloggers state clearly when they have accepted free merchandise or services from companies they discuss. Learn more about creating disclosure statements.

#5: Editing

The Yahoo! Style Guide recommends a number of proofreading techniques and suggests that writers use at least one of them, or combine a few:

• Print your page. Reading a printout is a great tactic for spotting errors.
• Wait. You’ll start to see what it actually says, not what it’s supposed to say.
• Ask someone else to read your copy. Having a second reader is one of the best ways to clarify and correct your copy.
• Read backward. Great for proofreading numbers and useful when you need to make sure that a piece of text is perfect.
• Read out loud. Reading out loud, or using screen-reading software, will make you take in the words differently. This is also a good way to check the “voice” of your piece and whether the text flows smoothly.
• Read line-by-line, word-by-word. Use a spell-checker.
• Change the look; e.g., font size, background color or text color.

#6: Frequency

The one thing readers have come to expect from a reputable blog is a frequent and reliable posting schedule. The number of posts you plan to write per week depends on your resources, but whatever works for you, it’s best to commit to a regular and consistent schedule.

#7: Grabbing Attention

With an inordinate amount of blog posts being published daily, you want to strive to stand out with the topic, writing and appearance of your posts. Grab attention with great copy, memorable images and inspiring videos.

Make your blog post stand out from the crowd by grabbing attention.

#8: Headings

Speaking of grabbing attention, one sure way to do that is with the use of headings and subheadings. Not only does it help the reader to ascertain what the post is about, but it also increases the readability of the post, which is an important consideration for all web content. Heading tags (e.g., H1 and H2) will also help with optimizing posts for search engines.

#9: Infographics

Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These representations are being created and posted in increasing numbers these days. What’s great for bloggers too is that many infographic designers often encourage others to embed the infographics on their blogs as long as they credit and link to the original with appropriate attribution.

Here’s a link to a cool infographic, The Journey of a Successful Blog Post.

#10: Juxtaposition

Sometimes coming up with a steady stream of ideas for blog posts can feel challenging. At times like these, you can use a technique where you reference two different posts and then write about the similarities and differences in the thinking and offer your readers a third unique viewpoint.

#11: Keywords

Using keywords in blog posts helps the post to be picked up and ranked by search engines. While it’s important to use them strategically in title tags, headings, body content, URL and meta description, it’s also important to not go overboard and keyword-stuff a post. Whiztechy has a very helpful article, “How to Use Keywords Effectively in Your Blog Posts.”

#12: Links

As discussed previously in #1: Attribution, links are the currency of the web. In addition to linking to posts you’ve referenced, you can also refer to and link back to one of your own related posts, which will also help your blog’s SEO.

#13: Mobile-Friendly

More and more readers these days are coming to blog posts via their mobile phones, so if your blog isn’t already mobile-friendly, you’ll want to take the necessary steps to make it more easily accessible. Many popular blogging platforms have mobile plugins and templates. Darnell Clayton shares helpful information in his post, “How to Make Your Blog Mobile Friendly.”

#14: Numbers in Titles

Jeremy LaDuque writes in his post, “5 Tips for Effective Email and Blog Titles,” that research has shown that “when a title contains a number, it gets more attention.” 26 Tips, anyone?

#15: Optimizing Blog Posts

As discussed earlier, using keywords and tags helps with a blog’s overall SEO. Taken a step further, Darren Rowse has a post, “Optimize a Single Post on Your Blog for SEO,” about steps you can take to go back and further tweak posts after they’ve been published by analyzing the competition, and looking further at on- and off-page optimization opportunities.

#16: Pain Points

Rich Brooks writes in his post, “How to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy,” that knowing your audience’s pain points will help you tap into conversations that may otherwise pass you by. Begin by finding key phrases and narrowing them down further so you can determine what’s most important to your audience.

#17: Question

Because most bloggers want to encourage conversation on their blog posts, many have found it helpful to come right out and ask readers questions at the end of the post, which gives people something specific to respond to. For example, an appropriate question to end this post might be “What blogging tips would you add to this list?”

#18: Readability

Michael Martin suggests that people come to your blog to read articles, and the easier they are to read, the better. He offers a useful resource, “30 Things That You Can Do Now,” which includes formatting suggestions regarding links, line spacing, pull quotes, font and background colors, structured hierarchy, italics, bold, etc.

#19: Style Guide

Blogs require a consistent style guide so that anyone who writes and edits posts will be able to adhere to the same rules. Some blogs choose to adopt the AP Stylebook and others prefer the MLA or The Yahoo! Style Guide. As Jonathan Bailey suggests, you’ll also want to decide up front how you address specifics such as post length/frequency, post titles (length, capitalization), formatting (subheads, lists), images (sources, sizes), links (number, format), attribution (quotes, photos), and author information/bio.

#20: Templates

Kit Singleton provides “7 Tips for Choosing a Business Blog Template.” She suggests thinking about key factors such as knowing your blog’s purpose, paying attention to aesthetics, the arrangement of columns, recommended blog features, modifiable CSS code, checking your blog in several browsers, and when the time comes, not being afraid to change the look and feel of your blog.

#21: Updates

At times you may find that something you wrote about previously has undergone a significant change. Rather than starting a new post from scratch, you can go back to the original post and update it with the information you’d like to add. For example, the number of users on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are constantly increasing, so you might add the new information and indicate that you’ve updated the page since the original post date. That way your posts won’t get too outdated and it’ll reflect well that you’re working to keep the material up to date. It also gives the reader a good frame of reference on the quickly changing landscape.

#22: Voice

How does your blog sound to a reader? What does it say about you and your business?

Georgina Laidlaw suggests that “Voice is the tone in which you present content…” If a message is what we say, then voice is a critical element in the tone of your content. Pace, rhythm, turns of phrase, idioms—even the way you use punctuation—all contribute to the voice of your blog.

Heidi Cohen offers 7 points to help you create your writer’s voice: personality, tells a story, is contextually relevant, listens and interacts, sounds like a real person, has a point of view and avoids sanitized corporate-speak.

#23: Write for the World

If you’ve ever looked at your blog analytics and found that a particular post was read widely in another part of the world, you’ll be able to fully appreciate this next tip—Write for the World—identified by the Yahoo! Style Guide. As it suggests, “Do not assume that you know who’s reading your website. Your audience is not homogenous; its members almost certainly vary in age, race, gender, physical abilities, nationality, culture, sexual orientation, and so on.”

Writing for the world can further be translated as banishing bias from your language; e.g., determine whether a group-specific reference is relevant, be exact, beware of false generalizations, use “us” and “them” cautiously, don’t make the characteristic the person, watch out for bias inherent in slang and other figures of speech, and don’t overcompensate.

Write for the world and banish bias from your language.

#24: Expert Interviews

Conducting expert interviews is a good content source for blogs to consider. Name recognition of someone in your field in whom your audience is interested has a good chance of increasing the post’s readership. Furthermore, if the person you interviewed links back to your site or tweets about your interview, your name becomes connected with the expert’s, and you can bring a new awareness and credibility to your blog. In the post “Traffic: Will the Expert Interview Increase Traffic to Your Blog or Site?, you’ll find a good discussion for how to go about asking for an interview with an expert, suggestions for how to conduct the interview and a list of sample questions.

#25: YouTube

There are many good reasons why you’d want to embed a YouTube video into a blog post. As YouTube says, “Video is much more engaging than text. It draws more users and keeps them on your site for longer… When looking to increase engagement, try using video as a way to start discussion or make a commentary by creating more context for your users.” Marziah Karch has a great post about how to share, embed and link YouTube videos.

#26: Zigzags and Leaps

In an attempt to keep our blog posts fresh, writers may need to explore new techniques every now and then. Books on the craft of nonfiction and even fiction writing can offer different directions for bloggers to take to get the momentum moving again. In the book Now Write! Nonfiction, Barbara Hurd offers a chapter entitled “Zigzags and Leaps.” She writes, “So the question becomes: how to make the mind move, how to make our thinking zigzag and swerve, plunge and leap as we search for the right direction? I often suggest that students with listless drafts make a series of mental moves that might open up things a bit, allow a little more in, including, we hope, the discovery that’s been eluding them.”

Final thoughts about fine-tuning blog posts: To have your blog serve as your online home base, it will require an ongoing commitment to quality content and great attention to detail. But the personal and business rewards of maintaining a blog will be well worth the effort!

What new tips will you try out? What blogging tips would you add to this list? Leave your comments in the box below.

All photos from Shutterstock.

This article will show you how to easily optimize your blog for search engines.

Let’s be clear on few points before we begin. When search engine optimization (SEO) is done the wrong way:

• It’s a spammy attempt to manipulate the search-engine traffic.
• It’s SEO experts selling a guaranteed top-10 placement.

When SEO is done the right way, it’s NOT guaranteed and it’s NOT immediate, but it is ongoing.

Now let’s cover the basics.

What’s your blog about? The topic you cover will, to a large degree, dictate your placement. If you said “real estate” or “automobile” or “website hosting” or “SEO,” you will have a LOT of competition. You could help things a bit by focusing on YOUR geographical area (as in “real estate in Pasadena, CA,” for example).

But remember, some topics are extremely competitive and therefore more difficult to crack, making it on the first, second or third page of the relevant search. This part is paramount because most Google sleuths don’t make it past the second page.

On the other hand, if your topic is obscure and very specific, PLUS the space is not densely populated with competition, you can conceivably end up as a top search result for that topic. This is assuming that you’ve implemented sound SEO practices. And that’s what this article is about.

Who are you targeting? Who is your audience?

Having a crystal-clear understanding of who your audience is and what THEY’RE searching for helps you narrow your focus and increase your chances of having an effective SEO campaign.

If all this sounds too complicated, you could just pay someone to do it. If you do decide to outsource SEO, you should set aside a minimum of $3,000 to $5,000 monthly for a dedicated SEO professional.

Now that you know the cost, are you a little more motivated to learn how to do it yourself? I would encourage you to ask around and get some quotes. Here is what you would be paying for:

A good SEO person will have varying degrees of proficiency in:

• CSS
• Data analysis
• Blogging
• HTML
• Copywriting
• Link-building
• Search engine algorithms

Those are the skill sets off the top of my head.

As I see it, you have three options:

1. Hire a dedicated SEO person/team.

2. Hire a part-time SEO expert who can dedicate a portion of his or her time to your page rank. This might be all that’s needed for most small- to medium-sized businesses. (Note: Page rank is a non-geeky way of saying “Google search-engine algorithm.”)

3. Learn the basics yourself. The basics will get you pretty far.

In this article I’ll focus on the last one—learn the basics yourself. So how do you do this? Well, you’ve come to the right place. An important part of any SEO strategy will be keyword discovery and implementation. This article will focus on those two factors.

Harvesting and Piggybacking

I recommend a three-step process in your keyword discovery process.

#1: Get into their heads.

A great place to start understanding what keywords are desirable is to find out what keywords are used by your comps (comps is a real estate term for comparable properties).

We do this by first inspecting what keywords are used on your comp’s web page.

In your browser, usually under “view,” you can “view source” of the webpage. Here’s how:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=erjqTugMviI

Takeaway lessons from the video:

• There will be a LOT of gibberish in there. But all we’re looking for are “meta tagged keywords.”
• Manual research allows you to get into your comps’ heads.
• View several pages to get a good sense of what your comps are trying to rank for.
• Repeat the process for another 3-4 comps.

#2: Piggybacking: Leverage Automation and Your Comps’ Research.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in a word or phrase that is relevant to your business.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG-42LmFKNE

Takeaway lessons from the video:

• Google Keyword Tool will return related phrases, often many that you didn’t even think of.
• You can export these results, view monthly search numbers and sort phrases by popularity.

After you’ve performed this on your top five comps, collected the data and exported your finding into a CSV file, you’ll have a pretty good idea of:

• What people are searching for (it’s almost never what you think it is)
• What your comps are indexed for
• Where you fit in

Now that you’ve harvested keyword information and effectively piggybacked on your comps’ research, you should narrow your list down to a manageable number (100 or so keywords).

The keywords that YOU are going to use should reside at the intersection of:

• Most relevant to you/your post/blog/website
• Most highly searched for
• Least used by your comps

Note: While recommendation #2 is a good guideline, do keep in mind that less often searched-for phrases tend to have higher conversion rates.

#3: Implement: Apply What You Learned.

It’s time to install and learn how to use a nifty little WordPress plugin called All in One SEO to quickly, easily and effectively utilize the information gathered during the harvesting and piggybacking research phase. If you’re not running a self-hosted WordPress website, this is not for you.

Download and install All in One SEO plugin. Click on the video for a little bit of show-and-tell.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5RhfJJWHK8

Takeaway lessons from the video:

• WordPress makes it very easy to add plugins; however, you shouldn’t install any plugins that haven’t been tested. Here are instructions on how to set up a WordPress sandbox on your laptop.
• Some plugins (like All in One SEO) are must-haves. Others should be installed only if absolutely necessary.
• All in One SEO will have to be configured globally, on per-post and per-page basis.

All in One SEO Pack Configuration—Global Settings

Plugin status:

You can enable it or disable it.

Home Title:

If left blank it will default to whatever you configured under Settings/General/Site Title in WordPress. However, don’t leave it blank.

Note: According to SEOMoz.org’s SEO ranking factors survey, page titles are one of the most important factors.

Entering a bad or blank title is NOT advisable.

Home Description:

While description ranks lower on the page rank scale, it’s paramount to have it filled out appropriately. Search engines will display the description immediately underneath your web page. There it’s best to have a human-friendly call-to-action type of message.

Check out how Barnes & Noble have a human-friendly call-to-action message.

Home Keywords (comma separated):

What are the main topics covered on your site? That’s what should be entered here in the order of relevance. For example “blogging, marketing, WordPress, writing,” and so on…

Note: Home keywords were abused in the early days of SEO (stuffed with popular but irrelevant search words), which resulted in search engines deprecating their importance.

Don’t overstuff. Spend a few minutes configuring and it might help. It certainly can’t hurt.

Canonical URLs:

Enabled by default and should be left as such. This helps with duplicate content, which is a HUGE no-no. If you’re not familiar with canonical URLs, and would like to be, read this Google webmaster blog post.

Rewrite Titles:

This controls the title-related settings underneath. We’re not going to cover them individually. “Title” is what you see in your browser’s window title bar. If set, all page, post, category, search and archive page titles get rewritten.

Why would you want to do this?

The default title generation setting for WordPress is extremely anti-SEO. Depending on your version of WordPress, the default structure will most likely look like this:

Category >> Blog Name >> Post Title

This is suboptimal.

You should allow the SEO plugin to rewrite it to something more SEO-friendly, for example:

Post Title >> Blog Name

Note: This is all about specificity. The post title is likely to have specific keywords related to the post itself. Therefore it should be the first thing a search engine “sees.”

WordPress, if configured correctly, can now assign an SEO-friendly name to your blog post (see below) without the help of All in One SEO.

Description Format:

Four available options, leave the default as is. It will grab the description from whatever is set at the post level.

404 Title Format:

The box sets the page title for your “page not found” error page. The default is “Nothing found for %request_words%”. Leave as is.

Paged Format:

This string gets appended/prepended to titles when they are for paged index pages (like home or archive pages). Leave it alone.

SEO for Custom Post Types:

WordPress version 3.0 introduced the ability to create your own custom post types in addition to the default two (post and page).

I really haven’t used this, so I can’t offer much in terms of practical advice. If you would like to learn more about it, visit WordPress.org Custom Post Types pages.

Custom Post Types for SEO Column Support:

Related to above, disabled by default. Leave it alone.

Use Categories for Meta Keywords:

This is for those bloggers who are hyper-strategic about their category names. If you’re like most of us, you’ll leave this one alone and add your keywords manually for each post.

Use Tags for Meta Keywords:

Checked by default, it causes the tags you set for a given post to be used as the meta keywords for that post. What this basically means is that your tags and your keywords don’t have to be entered in both places. In fact, if you enter the same word in both the Tag and the Keyword field, you might get dinged by Google.

Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:

Related to the third type of post we mentioned above. Irrelevant unless you’re using custom posts. Leave it alone.

Use No Index for Categories and (Tag) Archives:

This is kind of a non-issue especially if “Canonical URL” is configured. It tells Google NOT to crawl duplicate content.

Autogenerate Descriptions:

This is very cool if you can squeeze all your relevant keywords within the first 150 characters of the article.

Capitalize Category Titles:

Other than visual appeal I know of no special benefit of doing this. Google doesn’t care if your titles are uppercase or lowercase but it looks pretty.

Exclude Pages:

Enter any comma-separated pages here to be excluded by All in One SEO Pack.

This is helpful when using plugins that generate their own non-WordPress dynamic pages. Forums are a good example. You may decide to manage the way your forum gets “indexed” using forum-specific tools.

Additional (Post, Page, Home) Headers:

These are not required for basic SEO practices. They’re used with various webmaster tools but otherwise uninteresting.

Log Important Events:

This is for developers only. Once the global settings are all done, every time you write a new post, you’ll have to configure All in One SEO tool on per-post basis. No worries though, this one is quick and painless.

All in One SEO Pack Configuration—Post Settings

All in One SEO will place itself on the bottom of your WordPress new post configuration.

Title:

By default, the title will be generated based on your setting under Settings >> Permalinks. You should configure /%postname% under “Custom Structure,” which will generate the appropriate post title automatically.

If, however, you decide to enter a custom title here, it will take precedence over any other. Why would you want to do this? Post title ranks high on Google’s “importance” scale and stuffing your title with keywords might better your chances.

Description (Meta):

You have 160 characters to describe your post for search engine meta analysis. Use them wisely. Remember our Barnes & Noble example? This should be a human-friendly call to action. Include most relevant words first.

Keywords (Meta):

Put your most important keywords (search phrases) up front. Your hard work during keyword harvesting phase pays off right here.

Note:

Your keywords should be relevantly spread across the main body of the article, tags, meta description, keywords, etc.

Enable/disable on per-post basis:

Self-explanatory I hope. Use it in case you want to hide from Google.

All in One SEO Pack Configuration—Page Settings

Page Settings has a few more options than Post Settings. Let's work through them.

Title, Description and Keywords and Enable/Disable are the same as before.

The new settings are:

Title Attribute:

Has no or minimal effect on ranking. It’s basically a tool tip when you hover over a link.

Menu Label:

This in effect renames your page without renaming the URL.

Keyword research and configuration are some of the most important aspects of a well-run SEO campaign. In fact, they’re among the top most important things you can do.

If you had to choose your top three most important SEO strategies, what would they be? Leave your comments in the box below.

Let’s explore LinkedIn together and see if you can identify new ways to enhance your user experience by considering the topics discussed below. As I’ve done in the companion pieces to this post, 26 Twitter Tips and 26 Facebook Tips, I’ll introduce LinkedIn Tips from A-Z.

These tips will reference both personal and company perspectives. But before we get started, let’s go over a couple of LinkedIn basics—who’s on LinkedIn, creating your LinkedIn profile and developing your list of LinkedIn connections.

Develop a network of relevant connections.

Who’s on LinkedIn?

To put it simply, everyone; full- and part-time employees, contractors, freelancers and key decision-makers from any given industry or company can be found on LinkedIn.

Creating Your LinkedIn Profile

If you’re just getting started on LinkedIn, you’ll want to strive for 100% completeness on your personal profile by adding your current position, at least two past positions, information about your education, a summary of your background/experiences, a profile photo, details about your specialties and at least three recommendations. And if you’ve been on LinkedIn for a while, think about profile changes you can make to further demonstrate who you are and what you have to offer.

Developing Your List of LinkedIn Connections

You can grow your list of LinkedIn connections through webmail contacts (email contacts who are already on LinkedIn), colleagues and classmates, and through networking on LinkedIn groups.

Your connections are what make LinkedIn work for you, so taking the time to expand your reach is time well spent. A unique perspective on connections is offered by Stephanie Sammons in her post, How Connecting Your Connections to Connect with One Another Will Help Elevate Your Social Status.

LinkedIn Tips From A-Z

#1: Applications

As LinkedIn suggests, you can add third-party applications to “enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective.” There are currently 19 applications to choose from. Depending on what you want to highlight, you can give a good example of your specialties, areas of interest, and work samples.

For example, on my LinkedIn profile I’m currently using Reading List by Amazon, Blog Link and the new Publications feature. You can have a total of 15 modules and/or applications on your profile. A message bar will appear at the top of the page if you need to remove an application prior to adding another.

#2: Blog Links

You can bring your blog posts into LinkedIn with applications such as Blog Link or WordPress LinkedIn. It’s a powerful way to engage your connections with material you’ve written and if they hadn’t already been visiting your blog on a regular basis, your posts will make it in front of their eyes when they receive their LinkedIn updates.

#3: Company Pages

LinkedIn has offered company profiles since 2008 and last month the profiles were upgraded to “Company Pages.” Companies can now showcase significantly more about their business. With the new Products and Services tab, companies are able to feature products and services with descriptive overviews. Videos can also be embedded on the page, one per product or service. At this time, you can only upload videos from YouTube, although LinkedIn expects that to change in the near future.

Recommend your favorite products and services on LinkedIn Company Pages

“Since the Company Page roll-out, 20,000 companies are sharing over 40,000 products. Companies of all sizes and industries are using Company Pages,” said Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s director of product management. When a LinkedIn member recommends a company’s product, they share the recommendation with all of their connections.

Ryan spoke about the power of recommendations for businesses, and referred to the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, in which Nielsen found that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising. Ninety percent of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

#4: Direct Ad Campaigns

LinkedIn Direct Ads allow you to target ads by industry, company, geography, job function, seniority, gender and age. Ads can appear as a media box, banner ad or text hyperlink. Ads are pay-per-click or by impressions and can be stopped at any time.

#5: Events

With the LinkedIn Events application, you can browse by event type, topic, location and add your own event for users to find, promote and attend. Coree Silvera has a helpful post, Promote Your Event by Using LinkedIn Event Application. As she suggests, you can share with your contacts and also purchase paid advertising options targeting a specific audience on LinkedIn. This would entail going outside your own network of connections using advertising methods such as CPC (cost-per-click), CPI (cost-per-impression) or text ads.

You can also follow LinkedIn events on Twitter.

#6: Follow Companies

Company follows make it possible for you to keep your eye on key events happening at companies you’re interested in. You’ll see information regarding new jobs, new hires and promotions, what it’s like to work there via employee testimonials and how to contact a recruiter.

#7: Groups

LinkedIn Groups are a great way to stay on top of topics of interest to you and to network with others in your field. You can see who was most influential in the group the past week and follow their activities on LinkedIn. To find groups, go to LinkedIn Groups Directory.

LinkedIn has restrictions about whom you can reach out to with a free account. The person has to have been a colleague, classmate, someone you’ve done business with or a friend. One of the best bonus features of Groups is that you can send InMail to group members without having to upgrade to a premium account.

#8: Help Center

You can reference LinkedIn’s Help Center when you have questions and receive step-by-step answers.

#9: Images

As mentioned above, a profile picture is one of the key components that make your profile complete. Keep in mind though that the image can only be 80 pixels by 80 pixels.

Edenchanges has a very good blog post with suggestions for how to take a good LinkedIn profile picture. LinkedIn will permit you to resize a photo, but you won’t be able to do any editing. So choose your photo carefully keeping in mind location, what you are wearing, whether it has good composition and lighting and if it has the artistic feel you want. You can specify who sees your profile picture: my connections, my network or everyone.

#10: Jobs

When looking for a job, you can use LinkedIn to look into companies of interest to you by seeing if anyone you know may know someone at the company. Susan Adams, senior editor at Forbes, gives some useful tips for how to master LinkedIn for a job search in a series of articles. In one post, she discusses how to use advanced search by company, location and title. Check it out if you’re looking for ways to enhance job searches.

#11: Keywords

Use keywords to optimize your profile. Use words that are specific to your industry and skills. You can optimize the specialties section and even include mention of your geographic location to improve the chances of coming up in searches. (Learn more about SEO in #19.)

#12: Link to Your LinkedIn Profile

Be sure to include your LinkedIn URL in your email signature, on your website, info tab on your Facebook profile and blog, as well as on your print marketing collateral and business card.

#13: Mobile

Connect with LinkedIn on your mobile phone. There are apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Palm. For all other phones, go to LinkedIn mobile. The iPhone app for LinkedIn has recently been updated. Learn more about the latest version.

Connect with LinkedIn on your mobile phone.

#14: Network Statistics

With Network Statistics, you can see information about your network, including how many users you can reach through your connections. Your network grows every time you add a connection. To get there, click on the Profile tab, and you’ll see four more tabs: My Connections, Imported Contacts, Profile Organizer and Network Statistics.

#15: Organizer

Profile Organizer is a feature on the LinkedIn premium account that enables you to bookmark LinkedIn searches on profiles, company pages and jobs you may want to apply for. You can save the information to a folder of your choice, and add details and notes that you want to keep track of.

#16: Proactive

Use LinkedIn proactively. Don’t set up a profile and abandon it. In Shama Hyder Kabani’s book The Zen of Social Media Marketing, she suggests four ways to be proactive: 1) gain more visibility by adding connections, 2) increase your rank with search engines by making your profile public and customizing your public profile’s URL to include your actual name (LinkedIn is ranked very high by search engines), 3) get business advice by finding answers to your most pressing questions and 4) conduct market research by asking your potential clients or customers what their greatest needs are.

Enhance your LinkedIn user experience.

#17: Questions

One of the most utilized features on LinkedIn is questions and answers. Questions can be used for networking and marketing purposes. Many people make answering questions a way to demonstrate their expertise. Diana Freeman has a great post where she discusses four unique ways to get traffic to your blog from LinkedIn Answers:

• Create a new blog post in response to a question.
• Answer a question linking to relevant existing posts.
• Create a stand signature for your answers.
• Create a blog post asking a question that includes pictures.

#18: Recommendations

Recommendations are an important part of your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn suggests that users with recommendations are three times as likely to get inquiries through LinkedIn searches. To initiate a recommendation request, go to the Profile tab and select Recommendations. There you will find a list of your jobs and education and you can choose what you want to be recommended for, decide whom you’ll ask, create your customized message and send from within LinkedIn.

Kirsten Dixson, a reputation management and online identity expert, is quoted in a post by C.G. Lynch on CIO.com. She suggests you ask for endorsements from not only the person above you but “all the way around you: above, below and sideways.” Lynch adds that like a recommendation written for the paper-based or email world, a person recommending you on LinkedIn can benefit from some guidance on what thoughts and facts you’re looking to present in their recommendation.

#19: SEO on Your LinkedIn Profile

Mike Volpe shares some great suggestions in the YouTube video below for how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for SEO. Mike suggests customizing your public profile URL to be your name (versus the default LinkedIn URL that has a long string of numbers and letters), and edit the links to your websites. For example, instead of using the default “My company” for your website, you can add the name of your company and keyword anchor text. Watch the video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0glUGk81Kyg

#20: Tools

LinkedIn has a number of productivity tools that you can use to search, build your network and manage your contacts. You can download a toolbar for Outlook, browser toolbar, email signature, Mac search widget and a Google toolbar assistant.

#21: Updates

You can add Twitter to your LinkedIn profile and when you update your LinkedIn network by asking a question, sharing a thought or posting an article, you can choose whether to share it on Twitter at the same time. It’s a very powerful way to integrate the business side of your tweets. Read more about it on LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa.

You can also see all the activity of your LinkedIn connections when you sign into LinkedIn and go to Home Page, where you can take three actions on your network’s updates; e.g., like, comment or send a message.

#22: Videos

The new Products and Services tab on LinkedIn’s Company Pages gives you the ability to add product videos to your page. This is an incredibly dynamic way to showcase and communicate more about your company.

#23: Weekly

Make LinkedIn an active part of your social networking and be sure to update your profile at least once a week; e.g., making a connection, requesting a recommendation, asking a question, adding a slide presentation or adding a new book to your Amazon reading list.

Add LinkedIn updates to your to-do list.

#24: Experience

Use the Summary part of your profile to highlight the most important aspects of your experiences and what you have to offer. Add specific specialties as well.

#25: YouTube

LinkedIn’s YouTube Channel is a great resource where you can see videos and short “in tips” on topics such as creating a 100% complete profile, sharing your basic information, telling your story through your job history, and including details about your education. You might consider subscribing to LinkedIn’s YouTube channel so you can be notified anytime new videos are added.

#26: Zero In on Connections

Patrice-Anne Rutledge, the author of Using LinkedIn, suggests in her post, Seven Ways to Increase the Chance of Being Found on LinkedIn, that users develop a network of relevant connections. She says, “Focus on developing a quality network that can actually help you achieve your goals.”

Final Thoughts About LinkedIn

Researching and writing this post about LinkedIn has truly been eye-opening for me about the number of robust features and possibilities for using LinkedIn. In fact, up to now, it’s been my most underutilized social networking presence and I’m now committed more than ever to enhance my experiences on LinkedIn.

What LinkedIn tactics would you add to this list? Which ones are you already using? What do you plan to look into? Leave your comments in the box below.

Photo credits: Flickr: Bührmann’s photostream, Flickr: Solacetech’s photostream, Flickr: 4_EveR_YounG’s photostream & Flickr: Bark’s photostream

In an earlier post I talked about the need to fully optimize your website and blog posts for search engines.

However, content optimization will only take you so far. For a website to really take off in the search engine rankings, it needs to generate incoming links from relevant and reputable websites. And you have little control of incoming links.

To increase the likelihood of obtaining high-quality incoming links, here are seven things you can do:

#1: Create Content Others Will Want to Share

All search engine optimization (SEO) starts with content. The first step to generating incoming links is to create content that others will want to share. Blog posts that solve problems, provide a valuable resource, entertain, demonstrate innovation or even create controversy can all generate incoming links. Average content won’t cut it. It needs to be outstanding.

Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media sites are driven by the desire to share. One of the quickest ways to build social media credibility is to share outstanding blog posts, videos or other online content. When you create content that will give Twitter users or bloggers credibility just by sharing it, you’re going to generate valuable incoming links.

Don’t forget to make your content easy to share by including TweetMeme, Digg, Facebook or other buttons that are easy to find and use.

#2: Distribute Online Press Releases

Press releases are a great way to generate incoming links. A good press release can be directly published by any of a number of highly trafficked news organizations. Again, the key is to provide content that is of value to others.

When writing a press release, think like a reporter. What “news” is important to the reporter’s readers? Write it as if you were the reporter writing a story. Make the reporter’s or editor’s job easy and your press release has a much better chance of getting published.

One of the big advantages of online press releases is that you can control the back links to your site. Linking keywords in your press release to relevant pages on your website or blog can result in valuable incoming links.

Even the link coming from the press release site can be beneficial as most PR distribution sites have a high Google page rank. The key is to link from the body text of the press release to pages deep within your site such as a related blog post (deep linking). For example, a link to an article on your website providing tips for writing press releases wrapped around appropriate keywords (as opposed to a link to your home page) is a deep link.

Although there are a number of free press release sites available, paid distribution sites such as PRNewswire.com are often monitored by reporters and feed directly to Yahoo! News and other large websites. If you have the resources, a good press release on a premium distribution site can quickly pay for itself.

Distribution sites such as PR Newswire, Business Wire, PrimeZone or Market Wire distribute press releases to Yahoo! News and others.

#3: Write Guest Posts

Writing guest posts (like I’m doing here) on highly ranked, highly trafficked websites can also generate powerful incoming links.

Writers often will offer to write free posts in exchange for a link back to their own website. If the publisher will allow it, a link or two in the body of the post anchored to related keywords (deep links) can be even more valuable than the link in an author bio. Don’t believe me? How many of you clicked on the “tips for writing press releases” link above?

If you’re a good writer and have something to say, landing a guest spot isn’t all that difficult. The key thing is to pitch the website owner (or appropriate editor) an article that will be of value to his or her readers. Pitch the idea, not the entire article. Prior relationships don’t hurt either. If there’s a blog you’d like to write for, constructive comments and active participation can go a long way.

Remember, many blogs are run by individuals or small operations and creating daily content can be a lot of work. A good blog post by a guest writer can be beneficial to both the blog and the writer.

#4: Link to Others

Don’t be afraid to link to other blogs or publications. Linking to content of value not only provides a service for your readers but the incoming link will show up in the other blog’s analytics. Many blogs even display incoming links along with the comments. These links are one way to direct other bloggers back to your site. If they see something they like, they might return the favor.

Google also likes to see outgoing links to relevant and reputable websites.

#5: Share Content With Relevant Websites

Look for websites and blogs that offer content that’s complimentary to yours and let them know you’re there. For example, a lawyer who specializes in waterfront issues and riparian rights might share an article with a realtor who specializes in waterfront homes.

This can be as simple as an email letting the blogger know you enjoy his blog and a link to an article of interest to his readers. If you can directly tie it into something the blogger is currently writing about, even better.

In the old days, it used to be common to ask for a link exchange. Now, these link exchanges can come across as spammy—especially to the owner of a website with a high Google ranking. You’ll get much further with content that is highly relevant to the blogger.

#6: Create a Link Network

This is a tip that can do wonders for a group of topically related bloggers. About five years ago, I started blogging about my favorite college football team (and my alma mater). At some point, a number of bloggers in the Big Ten began to organize behind the scenes.

The most recent headlines from associated blogs can drive traffic for everyone in the group.

We all agreed to include links to each other’s blogs on our websites and someone created a feed reader that published the most recent headlines from the group in our sidebar. At the time it seemed like a good way to pick up a couple of readers from other college sports blogs. I had no idea the impact from the incoming links would be so huge.

Over the years, many of these blogs have grown into highly ranked websites while others have merged with larger content providers. Thanks to the network, we all have a number of incoming links from highly ranked websites loaded with relevant content.

The feed reader in the sidebar also notifies fellow bloggers and their readers of my most recent posts. I’ll often write headlines aimed at other blogs in the feed knowing that it may generate a response or at least drive traffic from other sites. This technique can often trigger a response from other blogs generating even more traffic for both of us.

Transfer this technique to a business blog and you could create a very powerful network. If you’re worried about competition, look for bloggers outside of your geographic region or closely related but not in direct competition with your business. Realize though that the benefits of the incoming link juice far outweigh the concerns of a few readers visiting another blog. Besides, if your content is good enough, they’ll find their way back to your site.

#7: Don’t Forget Internal Links

If you have a blog post that has achieved a good Google page rank on its own, use it to build in a couple of links to other pages within your site. The link will still hold search engine value even though it’s coming from within the same site.

Link-building takes time and should be an ongoing process. It’s also a world in which the rich get richer. As a website moves to the top of the search returns, lazy researcher syndrome kicks in. Reporters and bloggers will often click on the top returns just because they’re the first to pop up on the page. The upper positions on the search returns also bring perceived credibility just because of their position. As you work your way to the top positions, incoming links will start to develop on their own.

“Link-building is an ongoing process.”

Have you found success generating incoming links to your website or blog? What methods have you tried and what worked for you? Leave your comments and suggestions in the box below.