Integrating SEO and Social Media – Get More Lift
Today’s search engines are leveraging social signals. For the past year, the search engines have been aggressively integrating social features into their SERPs. Why should companies care? One reason is reputation management. It is now more critical for companies to think about their brand and reputations not only with social media initiatives, but with SEO as well. So how can companies actively leveraging social media programs drive SEO benefits? How can brands generate popularity and loyalty by optimizing social media content for SEO success? This session will provide many of the answers. Attendees will take away new ideas for identifying tactics and strategies for effectively integrating SEO and earned social media efforts.
Speakers:
L. Jennette Banks, Web Search Marketing Manager and Digital Strategist – IBM SWG Web Search Strategy and Solutions
Tim Grenda, Content Specialist, Matrix Direct Insurance
Jeff MacGurn, VP of SEO, Covario

I’ve started using Blekko for some of the same functions Google once provided and although Blekko is not perfect, it is certainly much more transparent with its data.

Here are a few links for guidance in getting started with. One hint, creating an account is free and gives you access to all sorts of data and tools.

Some resources:

• A Slasher’s Guide to Blekko – The Most Advanced Search Engine Ever Created
• Blekko for Dummies
• Blekko’s SEO Tools: What Information Do They Provide?

And this is how I came to be converted to Linux.  Randomly, in my desperate  searches I came across this article Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer.  The directions are extremely clear and I was able to go to the Ubuntu site, download Ubuntu Live, use Disk Utility on my Mac to burn a disk, and then boot my Lenovo with the disk (one tip, Lenovos and Thinkpads often require you to hold down f12 to boot from a disk).

I was lucky, because I was able to access my Windows files this way and download them all onto my external HDD (and yes, it would have been great if I’d done that before my laptop crashed).

I also bought a harddrive enclosure and attempted to access my old HDD that way once my new HDD was installed, but it would not be recognized.  I imagine YMMV, so that is also an option if booting from Ubuntu does not work for an installed HDD.

As Conrad Saam noted in SearchEngineLand last month in Excuse Me While I Have A Ranking Report Rant , ranking reports “convey progress while hiding failure. They distract from business goals and promote the misallocation of resources.” Personalization is one of the major factors as to why ranking reports are essentially a waste of time.

At SEMPDX’s SearchFest 2011 last week, Chris Sherman stated that personalization of results in Google is now the default. There is no way to completely turn off personalization and 60% of the results in SERPs are based on your secret Google “profile” based on your location, your search history, etc. You can’t get a “clean” ranking report anymore, so I recommend retiring this KPI.

Not showing up in SERPs is always a concern, but unless you can exactly recreate the experience of your potential audience in your own search results, your real and actionable data is in referrals to your site from Google. This is basic SEO, the goal of Search marketing is not #1 results in the SERPs; the goal is driving traffic from search engines to your site and gaining an audience of users with optimized content relevant to their searches.

Because I like data, I spend a lot of time with spreadsheets. I remember the first chart I ever made — I was so proud. It was a record of Google ranking improvements for pages due to changes made to title tags. It was also pretty ugly. In the years since, I’ve learned a little more about making charts legible and useful and many new ways of visualizing data have been introduced. I’ve spent a little too much time recently playing around with alphaWorks’ free Many Eyes tool. I spent about 2 minutes uploading some data from a comScore press release on September Search Engine rankings and then way too much time messing around with the data and creating all sorts of beautiful graphs. Like this one here:

You don’t have to upload your own data, you can also play around with existing data (and any data uploaded is fair game for other people to visualize with). You might say that Many Eyes is the perfect tool for those too lazy to put together their own graphs, but it has much more functionality than just graphing — you can make word clouds, map graphs and all sorts of cool stuff. And it’s also a good place to get started with graphs — especially if you have data, but not a lot of experience putting together visual representations of the data.

Click on Image Or any of the links to view on StripGenerator site in embiggened format.

This Wednesday I drove out to my local IBM HQ to get a new badge.  After 10 years, my magnetized badge no longer works with most of the new  badge readers.  I had to turn in my old badge, and when I hesitated a moment in handing it over to the security guy who made my new one, he was apologetic.  Apparently I’m not the only IBMer who feels nostalgic about his/her first badge.  But it’s not really the badge I’m nostalgic for, it’s the me I was a decade ago.  Ten years ago I came into IBM as an intern with training in Usability and Testing, Technical writing, and HTML.  I was so proud of my HTML skills.  I had several Geocities Web sites and a blogspot blog.  I cringe now when I think of the graphics and the coding and the silly stuff I posted to the internet (in Web 2.0, you  post pictures of your cat on Facebook, not your blog).  Mercifully, Yahoo finally put those Geocities sites out of their misery a year ago.  And the good thing is, I have learned so much in the past 10 years that those early sites do not reflect who I am and what I know anymore.

Ten years at one of the  largest technology companies in the world, working with some of the most talented developers, marketers, and business people in the world (seriously), has taught me a lot.   Over the years, I have learned how little I know (apparently there is more to the Web than basic HTML) and how valuable it is to surround myself with a team of people who know more.  And the best teachers I’ve had at IBM were the people who never came right out and pointed out the gaps in my knowledge, but instead patiently walked me through what I absolutely needed to know to get my job done.  I cannot thank those people enough — especially knowing that initially, I probably pissed a lot of them off coming in with my “great ideas” without a clue of what needed to be done to implement them.

My decade of learning experiences (many of them painful) have not made me give up on “great ideas” but I have a better understanding now of what it takes to be a good colleague in a large, multi-skilled, multi-country and time zone organization.  And one action I’ve learned is key no matter where you sit in the organization is to be respectful.  Some people call this by different names — having patience, being flexible, practicing kindness, etc. But if you always have Be Respectful at the top of your ToDo list, you will come to the end of each day with more goals reached and more of your humanity intact. And being respectful helps you create those teams of smart people you need to surround yourself in order to complete those complicated projects.  Some days it’s hard to remember and I let my eagerness to get the job done at any cost get in the way of being my most respectful self — I’m not perfect.  But each day is a work in progress.

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