Social Media and Google+

You probably know already that we focus on search engine optimization, adwords, online and offline marketing, and software to do the same.

Backlinks used to be the most important aspect, and they’re still very important. However, nowadays, especially after the latest Google updates, there’s a new factor that is rapidly rising in it’s relative importance for successful search engine optimization.

I’m talking about Social Signals of course you will for sure hear more about this in 2012. That’s because this is the year that Google is making an all-out push into social media and its integration into their search ranking algorithms.

So what are social signals? Very simple, this is just a fancy name for something you’re probably already doing — mentioning your blog posts or new sites on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other such sites. If you do this, you’re already sending a signal to Google that the blog post or new site is important, and Google will then take notice of the fact that your content had a mention on the social sites. That’s the long and the short of it.

Social signals are a very good indicator for Google whether a specific piece of content has value — because these signals are supposed to come from humans. Of course the temptation is there to “trick” this new system, just like people game their backlinks today using the outlawed ‘link farms’.

But I advise against it, because determining if a social signal is noise or valuable should be quite easy for Google, with its massive computational resources. That’s because it is very hard for the ‘tricksters’ to avoid leaving any footprints of their activities. Even such innocuous factors such as the timing of the social signals can be analyzed and a fake signal will stand out like a big red pimple in the middle of legitimate data. That is exactly why Google is raising the importance of legitimate social signals in their determination of what is important and valuable content to show to searchers.

So what can you do? The solution is simple: write valuable content that will generate social signals naturally. It’s the old Google mantra all over again: write for the human reader, not the search engine. If people like your content then they will talk about it on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus

Reputation Management is Very Important

Your online reputation can be changed overnight, it is highly important to keep track of what people are saying about you so you can protect your brand and boost your reputation.

We have never been so transparent in all of our history. Criticism and praise exists on a global basis. You have to be careful what you write on the web. People may have different personas at work and at home, but they all can be linked back to the company.

Even if you protect your profile, your mates (contacts) might not, so someone can link through a friend’s name all the way back to you. Young people are addicted to chatting online, and there is a real danger that they will bring this attitude through into the workplace and this could reflect on your company’s reputation.

Furthermore, anyone can start up a website or social media account in the name of your company and use it to write whatever they want about you or your business. Companies should protect their name by acquiring as many account names as they can on the social media sites. You should own your names on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as a minimum. There are over 340 social and bookmarking networks you could be part of. You can bookmark any website to your own social network and write what you like and it will be picked up by the search engines.

Most companies are extremely naïve about social media. What are you going to do if someone grabs your name and starts writing about you? Would you be aware? You need to have tools to be able to monitor this as shown above. We recommend clients at the very least do a thorough search for any information on their company. If you do find something negative you are unhappy about, do NOT simply fight back with nasty comments about the person that wrote the article. Be very professional in replying to the comments and use it as a way of showing other prospective clients that you value ‘feedback’.

There are a large selection of websites including Reputation.com who flood the web with positive stories about a company, thereby pushing the negative comment further down the Google search list, hopefully so far that no one will ever bother to look. However, Google will be watching for this approach and will unduobtedly ban its approach as they did with link and content creation farms a couple of months ago.

Another approach is to create multiple links to existing web pages to ensure they show up at the top of a Google search, although Google is trying to stop such “link and content creation farming”. One of the better approaches is to be open and honest with people and start a dialogue with your clients using the social networks. If this is done correctly, you will improve and protect your reputation.

We help people create, monitor and manage their online reputations using social media.

Since we get asked many times each week about keywords, I thought it would be a good to reiterate the fact Google does NOT use the keyword meta tag and has not for many years.

We have been telling all our clients for well over 2 years that Google does not use this tag and it was finally stated by Matt Cutts, Google in a video they uploaded to the Internet on 21st Sept 2009 !!!

At Attractum we design and develop websites that are stylish, fast loading, straightforward to navigate and search engine friendly. We promote accessibility in our design and ensure our web site work is validated to meet current web standards.

Our web development work ranges from brochure web sites, database web sites (ASP & PHP/SQL), ecommerce web sites, through to content management systems (CMS).

Whether you require a basic or brochure website or a more complex ecommerce design, Attractum takes a flexible approach which you can trust and rely on.

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