Omar Kattan

There are several ways to attract traffic to a website.  These include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO).  According to the Wikipedia, Social media optimization is

a set of methods for attracting visitors to website content by promoting and publicizing it through social media. SMO is a subset of social media marketing, which is promoting and publicizing products and services in general through social media. SMO is one of two online methods of optimizing (attracting visitors to) website content; the other method is search engine optimization (SEO).

The term “social media optimization” was first used and described by Rohit Bhargava. Bhargava’s original six rules for conducting social media optimization are:

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mashup
• Get communities connected

 An example of a company effectively using social media optimisation to increase traffic and sales to their site is Dell.

Dell generated over a million dollars in the past year and half through sales alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell receive messages or tweets when discounted products are available.

Dell has several  Twitter accounts including Direct2Dell, StudioDell, DigitalNomads but the one with the most success is the Dell Home Outlet Store with over 1.4 million followers and growing.

Dell is also an active blogger, using their Direct2Dell blog and their IdeaStorm project to become a better, more responsive, and more likeable company.

Today, many other companies are using social media to increase their brand’s presense on the Net and increasing traffic and sales, it’s become a natural extension and indispensible part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy. 

In the future, social media optimisation will play a bigger role in online marketing and the companies who do not jump on the bandwagon today will miss out.

Blogger Outreach is the process of connecting with bloggers for the purpose of  promoting a brand and increasing it’s visibility to a niche audience.  There are also SEO benefits from a well executed blogger outreach programme.  These lie primarily in the fact that when bloggers talk about your brand, they will most likely link to it.  These valuable links from trusted relevant sources improve the authority level of the site and reflect positively on the rankings.

So how do you go about planning and executing a blogger outreach programme?  Here are the steps to get you going:

 1)  Buzz monitoring:  You start by listening to the buzz around your brand and identifying the source of this buzz.  However not all buzz is equal.  Some sites are more influential than others.  You need to identify the influential sites that speak about your brand and keep a list.

 2) Contact.  Before you contact the bloggers, you need to have a story to tell.  What is your proposition?  Why should the said bloggers cooperate with you?  The best type of approach is one where you provide the blogger something in return for them writing about you.  For instance, if you have a new product launch, send a free sample to the blogger before launch and ask them to review it.

3) Monitor.  Once you’ve established the relationship with the bloggers, monitor the traffic you receive from each of them.  Delve deep into the analytics stats to try and get a feel about which bloggers have sent the most targeted traffic.  Once you have that piece of information, focus on these bloggers and build relationships with new ones. 

 Here are some more resources on blogger outreach:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18793026/Blogger-Outreach-101

http://www.prblogger.com/2008/03/the-seo-benefits-of-blogger-outreach/

http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-launch-successful-blogger.html

http://www.crayonville.com/blog/?p=345

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/116560

If your brand is mentioned on the web its very natural to want to tell your users about it. However doing so by linking to the stories that link to you might devalue these links that you’ve worked so hard to acquire.

In the video below, Matt Cutts sets the record straight on linking to press releases and brand mentions on the web.  Matt compares it to reciprocal linking (link exchange) which is frowned upon by search engines.

Here is what Matt says…

YouTube Direkt

While it’s very tempting to boast to your users about all the mentions of your brand on the net, don’t do it by linking to them! Alternatives to linking to press releases to show your users where your brand is mentiond include:

1) Scan/take screenshots of the press releases mentioning your brand
2) Link to the Google/Bing/Yahoo urls mentioning your brand (e.g. http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=%22dell%22 new)
3) Link to the Google search results of press releases mentioning your brand (e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2SNYK_en-GB&q=site%3Aprwebdirect.com+%22dell%22&meta=&aq=f&oq=)

The above are alternatives to linking to press releases mentioning your brand.

Can you think of other ways to tell your users about your brand’s mention in the press without actually linking to the press releases?

Google recently announced it’s top secret project codenamed “Caffeine”.  This project seems to have been a few years in the making and meant to capitalise on the growing interest in “real time search” and the “semantic web”.

I have yet to see any major changes in Google’s search results due to Caffeine but maybe this is because it has yet to be launched in the UK.

The test bed for Caffeine is the US market.  Actually, in Google’s official announcement, they provided a link to the DC hosting the “new and improved” search results.

What are the implication of Caffeine to webmaster around the world?  More specifically, how will Google’s new algorithm impact SEO efforts.  Here are my thoughts:

1) Now more than ever, Brand presence in social media has become increasingly important as Google Caffeine will place more efforts on social media noise among other factors.

2) Google Caffeine boasts a larger and more comprehensive  index of results.  This means that webmasters need to ensure (now more than ever) that their websites are as accessible and spider friendly as possible.  Load time of web pages in now becoming increasingly important in ranking results.  Don’t skimp on your hosting!

3) The semantic web is fast closing in on us.  Google Caffeine has an improved element of semantics in it’s algorythm.  What does this mean?  Well if you’re writing a page about dogs and “man’s best friend”  for example is not included, this could hinder your ranking efforts.  Web copy needs to take this into account.

4) Following on from point 3 above, information architecture is playing an increasingly important role in rankings.  The idea behind information architecture is to build a website where the information contained within is structured and marked-up in such a way as to portray a sense of authority to search engines.  This factor in itself has always played an important role in search rankings however Caffeine’s launch will make this even more of a critical ranking factor!

We are yet to see the full implications of Caffeine but one thing’s for certain, the days of traditional SEO methods are numbered!

Ever since Google dropped a bombshell on webmasters attempting to sculpt pagerank (control link juice flow using the nofollow attribute),  SEOs have been trying to figure out ways to achieve the same results via other means.

 Some of the percieved successful methods to sculpt pagerank include:

• Hiding/Redirecting links in Javascript (Potentially excludes up to 4% of search engine users)
• Embedding links in Flash (Google can now find links in Flash and you can potentially exclude up to 7% of users)
• Cloaking Links (against search engine guidelines)

The above methods are more risky and far more labour intensive than URL consolidation which I will discuss below:

The idea behind URL consolidation is to consolidate all pages on your site that are unimportant for driving traffic into one.

An example of such pages are  ”utility pages” such as T&C’s, Privacy Policy, etc under one URL instead of each having it’s own. 

In order to allow users to link to specific sections of the newly combined Utilities page, you can use the hashtag “#” to create seperate links to each of the sections of the page.

The same idea can be implemented for other pages on your site including the about us section, the advertising section and even blog comments and paginated pages.

Using URL consolidation has officially become the new pagerank sculpting, jump on the bandwagon, if you haven’t already!