Category: Social Media

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Managing SEO and Social Media Together

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

 

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remains that search marketing and social media cannot be managed in silos.

According to the presentation given by Andrea Fishman, vice president of global strategy at BGT Partners — a marketing and design firm — at Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2011, “57% of digital marketing impact is derived from SEO.” But search engine optimization also has a symbiotic relationship with social media, press relations, paid search, offline advertising, and other marketing channels.

Read more »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Rel=Canonical Consolidates Google +1’s Too

While researching how to add the +1 button, I came across this interesting tidbits on using rel=canonical to consolidate +1’s to the canonical version of a page. This bit from the FAQ is interesting because it mirrors advice on canonicalizing URLs to consolidate link juice, which points to a possible future in which +1’s enjoy a similar level of algorithmic importance as links do. Otherwise, why bother to worry about canonicalizing for them, hmmm?

From Google’s +1 FAQ:

However, your site may make the same content available via different URLs. For example, your site may have several pages listing the same set of products. One page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=alpha
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. As a result, +1’s for the other versions may not appear in search results.

You can make sure Google displays +1 annotations for the most search results possible by adding the rel=”canonical” property to the non-preferred versions of each page. This property should point to the canonical version, like this:

This tells Google: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.” Now, when a user +1’s a page with a non-canonical URL, Google will associate that +1 with the canonical, preferred version.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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How to Invite Friends to Google+

How do you invite friends to Google+ while it’s in field test mode and invites are officially disabled? Use the the “share by email” back door.

All you need to do is share a post with someone who isn’t a Google+ member yet. I just share the same post over and over from my profile stream. Here’s what I use.

You can paste in their emails individually or create a Circle of unregistered friends and invite that Circle all at once.  When you add unregistered friends an option appears at the bottom of the share window next to the Share button to confirm that you want to share with these unregistered users by email. YES, you do! Check the box and hit send.

Google+ will send them an email work the first words of the post you’re sharing as the subject line of the email. It looks like this.

All your friend needs to do is click that orange-red button to start the registration process. New users are rate limited by hour so if they can’t get in at first tell them to try again later.

This is a Google+ invitation loophole, so be warned that it may stop working temporarily at any time. Good luck!

Oh and if you don’t know anyone who can invite you, leave me a comment here with your email. My comments are moderated so no one will see your email but me. PieRat’s promise not to use them for any purpose except your Google+ invite lest I be keel hauled.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Making Google+ a Little Less Lonely

I admit it, I used a coworker’s Google+ invitation to sign up two days ago, and now I’m surrounded by … no one I know. For the first day I couldn’t even find anyone I didn’t know.  I’m here to tell you, a social network with no social is extremely depressing and a little creepy. It was starting to feel a little bit like The Blair Witch Project, when they were separated and scrambling through the woods in the dark lost and alone. “I’m so … scared….”

Why was it so hard to find anyone else on Google+? How long would the typical new user really put up with this sad experience on a new social network? Not very long. But I’m a geek. And I want Google+ to win with an unreasonably strong desire.

Then I discovered the “Nearby” screen in the mobile app’s Stream. When viewing your Stream in the Google+ Mobile android app, just swipe to the right to switch to the Nearby Stream. At least now I could see comments from people I didn’t know physically nearby having conversations I didn’t really care about. But they were people — I’m not alone anymore!

Better than skulking around after random people, today I discovered that Mashable and The Next Web are on Google+ and followable! Following them led me to discover their writers, such as my favorite Mashable author Ben Parr. Ben is single-handedly lighting up the stream with Google+ chatter, Hangouts and generally helping folks practice their Google+ing. Now my stream has content in it, and I can see the appeal of Google+ a little more clearly. I’m more eager than ever to invite my friends so that I can use Google+ how it was actually intended.

Today Google+ is a mini-Twitter to me. Content streaming in from a couple of blogs I already follow in my feed reader.  Not that interesting, but a novelty.

In the future, I can see Google+ as a maxi-Facebook. Google+’s sharing and communication features are superior to Facebook’s. Hangout is brilliant, and I don’t even like video chatting. The idea of “hanging out” with a group of friends near and far online over video somehow seems more desirable than video chat, even though I know it’s the same thing. Incorporating it into a social experience where I’m likely to be signed in most of the day anyway on my PC and phone, though, makes it somehow feel more interesting.

All I need now are my friends and family. And guess who has them: Facebook. No, you can’t add your friends directly from Facebook to Google+ since Facebook and Google don’t Like each other. But Mohamed Mansour developed a Chrome plug in that let’s you export your Facebook friends to CSV or Google Contacts, from which you can add them to your Google+ Circles. Way to go! I’m trying it out right now. With 400+ Facebook friends, it’s a slow process, but it’s working in the background so what do I care. Hopefully someone I really care about out of those 400+ friends will be on Google+ too.

LinkedIn also allows you to export your connections here http://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport. I should do this anyway, but importing these 460-some connections into my Google Contacts now will likely yield a  few more Google+ers.

Google+ logoAside from those import options, I wait for invitations to open up again. Care to follow me? Jill Kocher on Google+.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Will you +1? I will.

 

Google has taken a lot of criticism for failure to launch in the social sphere. Some cite the launch of +1 for websites as the most recent example of missing the boat. But I say it’s ok to launch a social signal before a (second) social platform. They serve different purposes.

I agree that Google Wave was awful, at least in terms of roll out. How can you possibly expect a social platform to succeed when users’ friends and coworkers don’t receive invitations? Social just isn’t social without your network. Not to mention its freakish complexity.

So how, then, can +1 succeed without a social network behind it? In its far more limited scope, just having contacts in Gmail constitutes a network.

As someone who uses Google products regularly, from Gmail and Google calendar to Google docs and Android, not to mention AdWords and search, the number of people associated with my Google account is lightyears ahead of the number I could find on our invite to Wave. Which was 6. And they weren’t the 6 people I needed to collaborate with most. Shrug.

The lower threshold of participation in +1, as well as its simplicity, is already a big step in the right direction. While +1s won’t impact rankings (today), the potential for searchers to see their friends’ and coworkers’ +1s in search results would be a powerful way to encourage click through to your listing vs. a competitor’s.

With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.
— Google Blog

Granted, the effectiveness of +1 as a differentiator for your search marketing efforts depends on your audience’s (and their networks’) adoption of Google products. But for the relatively low price of adding a button, it’s worth a try in my books. I’ve got the request in to my dev team already.

Now the problem is juggling all these darned buttons without hopelessly cluttering the design – 2 for Twitter, 2 for Facebook, one for email, now +1. Isn’t there a more elegant solution that doesn’t just roll them all up into one invisible “add this”? Bueller?

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.