A live blog of a panel session at SMX Social Media in Las Vegas, 6 December 2012

Travis Wright – Consumer Social Media, Symantec.com (@teedubya)

SEOcialization, Bro!

Bro is the new SEO: Business Relationship Optimization.

Navigate the corporate silos. SEOs need to work with teams throughout the organization.

Social impacts search, bro!

Social sharing is link building 2.0.
-Facebook fans
– Shares
– Twitter Followers
– Tweets with your brand
– Google+ “have you in their cirles
etc.

How to increase your BRO
1. Develop guest posting strategy
2. Identify key influencers
3. Use Blog outreach tools: GroupHigh and BuzzStream
4. Use Gmail plugins like Rapportive and Yesware (shows if they opened your email)
5. Use Data.com / Jigsaw.com to find contact info
6. Connect with Jouralists: HARO, Mucrack
7. Acquire Author accounts on major online publications

Mattt Cutts and Duane Forrester agree: SEO revolves around content. And social media is all about sharing content. All businesses should have content creation engines in place.

Search is more than Google and Bing. For example: Twitter Trends and Search. Latch on to trending tweets (but naturally, not spammy!)

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. Optimize keywords and tags.

Pinterest now has sophisticated search.

Tumblr has a good search function. If you are a brand, reach out to a Tumblr rep.

Don’t be afraid to repurpose content. Change a blog post into a SlideShare.

Take advantage of Google Authorship.

Slides from Travis’s presentation

Sarah Lokitis – Social Media Manager, Search Mojo (@Lokitis)

4 Ways to Search Engine Optimize Your Social Media Efforts

1. Integrate Keywords

Figure out your focus keywords
– Integrate in SM profiles
– Use in status updates
– Create tags and categories for blog posts
– Incorporate in blog posts and other content

Social/SEO Planning
– Incorporate links to your site and focus keywords in social media and blogging editorial calendar

2. Incorporate Google Authorship
Rel=author increases CTR and builds personal brand.
Author search: the link in the snippet gives exclusive search results for your content.
If people stay on your content and go back to Google, Google will expand your author result to show more links for you.
You can see your authorship data in Google Webmaster Tools > Labs
Test your markup with the Structured Data Testing Tool.

3. Open Graph Tags
Use OG: Control how your content is shared. Don’t let your content default.

4. Network for Links

Mathew Guiver Senior Digital Marketing Manager, RelayRides (@mathewguiver)

Leveraging Social Shares to Build SEO Links

Produce and publish content that is not only worth reading but worth sharing.

Examples:
Social Fundraising. When promoting a fundraising campaign, ask those who can’t give money to contribute by social sharing.

Infographics. Great social link bait.
– Quality is important. Don’t cut corners.
– Provide original insight.
– find designers on Freelancer, Elance, or Gigwalk
– Upload media directly to Twitter (results in great shares and RTs)
– Infographics are great for Pinterest too.

Tips for Social Link Baiting:
1. Do something original (not another iPad giveaway) Something others will get excited about and want to share and link to.
2. It’s a long term investment. Not going to rank #1 overnight. Don’t get discouraged by slow conversion if
3. Blog about it. Have an anchor post for every campaign. Provide sample tweets in the post. Focus all linking activity to that one blog post!
4. Schedule frequent updates about your initiative.
5. Ask for retweets. Studies show this increases retweets.
6. Start using Twitter promoted products. Not great for ROI, but great for building a social sharing campaign for link building. StumbleUpon actually has a very worthwhile paid ad product (also Reddit and Tumblr)
7. Don’t forget about LinkedIn. Great social sharing happens there!
8. Learn from your mistakes and try again!

END OF SESSION