Optimizing Seo Webinar - If content is king, what is queen?

Chris Hoell: My name is Chris Hoell, social media marketing manager with My Commerce Digital River. I want to welcome everyone to our webinar, SEO Optimization: If Content is King, What is Queen? This is the second installment of our series of webinars aimed at helping you improve your SEO. I would like to point out that should you have any questions during the webinar please feel free to submit in the chat box or tweet it using the hashtag and the slide deck. We will try to answer all the questions that come up during the Q&A period at the end of the webinar but should we not get to your question I will be posting all the questions and answers on our blog later on. With that I am going to turn this over to our speaker, Mike McAnally. Mike is owner and partner at Nordaclick Interactive. He has expertise in many facets of interactive marketing and online initiatives with more than fourteen years of online marketing experience. Mike’s expertise covers all facets of the interactive industry from SEO, PPC, and affiliate marketing to social media, web strategy, and mobile search. With that I will turn the presentation over to Mike. Mike McAnally: Thank you, hello. In 2013 search engines are no longer analyzing just your site content and keywords. They are also monitoring your overall site presence. In the second installment of our optimizing SEO webinar series we will be looking at areas outside of your website that need to be optimized for SEO. One, we will cover do not forget the king recapping the last webinar. Second is mobilizing your website. We will talk about building social authority, increasing the number of social signals. We will also talk about ways to earn reviews and overall benefits of a strong SEO and social strategy. The first thing I would like to talk about is recapping what we talked about in the first webinar. SEO basics are still king. Before we move on to the queen we need to make sure that we nail down all the basics. The basics of SEO are still what are going to get your site ranked in the search engines. So this includes crawling your site, having a site that is indexable and can be crawled for its content. Also keyword research is of the utmost importance. And really where you target those keywords on your page is secondary importance. So making sure you have keywords in your code and in your content is important to make sure the search engines rank you for the appropriate topic s and keywords. Finally, driving links and we will talk a little bit more about driving social links in today’s webinar. Today we are going to move on to the top part of the pyramid which includes overall building your social authority. The first subject is mobile. The future of mobile is the future of everything. Your mobile device is going to become your wallet, your car keys, your house keys, your communication, your social life, and your identity. Mobile is growing at an astounding rate and is extremely important to recognize that the mobile user is your user of the future. A couple stats around mobile growth: according to a comscore survey from 2009 to 2015 mobile internet users are expected to grow from eight hundred million to one point nine billion users. That is a two hundred and forty-seven percent increase. At the same time desktop internet users are expected to grow from one point four billion to one point six billion, only a fourteen percent increase. What this results is that eventually we are going to have mobile – more mobile users than desktop users. And the forecasts show from various sources that mobile users will outpace desktop users later in 2013 and start pulling away in 2015. So what does this mean for SEO? Well, mobile has a certain design. You need to cater to your mobile customers. Mobile design for SEO is of the utmost importance to make sure you drive that traffic properly to your site. The gold standard for mobile design is what is called responsive web design. Responsive web design allows you to produce one set of content with one URL, one code, one style sheet, that will cater to multiple devices. As you can see from the image here, the same content is rendered differently on a desktop, a laptop, than it is on a tablet or a mobile device, a smartphone per se. So the advantage of having responsive web design is that you are showing the same content. The same content is being indexed by the search engines, but yet you are still able to show it to multiple devices. This again is what is recommended by Google. And actually the first true recommendation of HTML 5 which is the code for mobile design was from Apple who does not allow Flash to be broadcast on their products and wants you to use HTML 5 instead. So if you do not have a responsive web design at this time that is fine. We would like you to move forward and develop one. But in case you have an M site, which is a mobile site that shows up your phone, there are some things you need to do for SEO and for your customers that are important to make sure you drive the correct calls to action. One is to maximize site speed. When people come into a mobile site, they are going to be on a mobile device. In general that mobile device is going to be connected to the internet but not at all times. A lot of times people will be walking around in an area, downtown let us say, and they will be on 3G. So it is the utmost important to make sure that you have good site speed that your site loads quickly. You also want to make sure with an M site, and then you have a separate regular site, that you deliver the proper content to the phone. For example, you do not want to deliver a full website to somebody on a smartphone and you do not want to deliver a mobile site to somebody on a tablet. So to optimize your code you need to add some codes and some tags to your page. So for example, a mobile CSS, a metaview port tag, the apple icon and mobile redirection are important to make sure you deliver the correct content to the correct device. Moving forward on the actual design, mobile sites need to deliver different content that is shorter and different than the main site. On the example here for Domino’s Pizza you can see what a mobile site looks like and what that experience is versus what a standard website is. A standard website, if you deliver a standard website to a phone, the text is very small, it is hard to see navigation, and you have to use your fingers to increase and decrease the screen size just to see the site. So when we develop a mobile site, the keys are to enable social functionality which we will talk about in more detail and also optimize for SEO. Yes, you have less content but you can use more direct keywords. Also, we want to make sure – one of the trends we have seen lately is using – delivering an app as a substitute for developing a mobile site. People do want your apps but you have to remember apps have a limited audience. So deliver your mobile website, offer the app as an option. And again, deliver a good overall experience. So what is the goal of mobile design? I mean, obviously you want to get people to your site. You want them to see your brand. You want them to see the page rendered correctly. But really it is M commerce. M commerce. M commerce is exploding in growth. In 2012 eight billion dollars of total sales was on M commerce. That is about four percent of total retail sales. It does not sound like that much, however, according to Forrester mobile growth is supposed to – mobile commerce, excuse me, and is expected to quadruple in the next five years. What does this mean overall in the next five years if you look at this chart? Total retail growth as a percentage is actually going to decrease slightly from six to four percent. Total eCommerce growth is also going to grow as an overall percentage of growth. And finally, M commerce growth is going to be incredible: triple digits to double digits. So what we really need to do with mobile commerce is make sure that you keep shoppers on a one way track to your site. We know that conversion rates on mobile devices are about thirty percent of what they are on a regular device. So you really need to streamline the checkout process. As you can see from this example from Surface Windows 8, they give you a really short description and a buy now button. If you want to learn more about the product you are probably going to return to the site at a later time. Moving on to social. So before we jump into how to create social signals and how to increase your overall social authority I want to talk about social outside of just what we think of social. Social media is thought about especially in the United States as being Facebook and Twitter. But social media is global. The United States, yes, they have a very high penetration of internet users. But the growth in social media is coming from international. And when you take the populations of countries like Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Japan, the percentage of internet users moving online is incredible because of the population. The number of internet – or number of social media users in China is more than the population of the United States alone. So when you are going after a social media strategy you want to make sure that you realize social media is global. Facebook is the dominant network but there are others. Out of the two hundred and some countries that are in the world, seven of them are not dominated by Facebook. But those seven are very important. And when you look at this map you can see that countries like China, Brazil, even the Netherlands do not have Facebook as their dominant provider. So again pay attention to those international networks. So when we look at all right, we need a social global strategy, what are some of the challenges? One of the biggest things we hear is if it works here it is going to work everywhere. Just because it works in one market does not mean it will work in multiple markets. Different markets contain different challenges. Those are different languages, dialects within those languages, cultural nuances, those are all the things that you need to consider when looking at a global strategy. So if you do business in a country you obviously have to understand that country. And if you are going to communicate with people socially and globally you need to understand these three things. Finally there is social legal. There are privacy laws that are very strict in the European Union and Germany. There are censorship issues, example, for not being able to blog in China or not being able to use Facebook in some countries. There are also product service disclosures and industry disclosures that we have to use in the EU and _____ [0:09:44]. So moving on from the global concerns we want to look at the positive here and say how do we build authority? Now that we know we have not only a social domestic challenge it is a global challenge? Today what we are going to do is talk about building authority. So when we talk about, it is not just your site. It is your authority; we have to look at three key things. Those three things that you want to do to build that authority is to earn links. Earning links is one of the most important things you can do with social. It has been one of the base SEO 101 level things since SEO was started. Second, you want to drive your overall authority in buzz. And finally, create social content. We are going to walk through all these this afternoon. So first looking at overall social authority you have to understand there is starting to be a transition from search engine marketing to social media marketing. No longer can you just talk at customers, you need to engage your customers. Customers just do not want to be – to follow you, to like you, or to have a stream of information or promotions coming to you. They want to engage with your brand. They want to build that trust. They want to like you. So how do we do that? Well, we are going to look at link building first. So we are going to look at links you can create, meaning you can go out and create these links yourself. And one of the most important things from an SEO standpoint is driving links back to your site. Links equate to authority. Links equate to recommendations for the search engines. The higher the site’s authority meaning it is trusted by the search engines. It has a high level of traffic the more link juice, you might have heard that term you are going to get it in a minute. So today we are going to talk about setting up links on social networks. So how do we go out, claim our profiles, and optimize our sites? Bookmarking sites and directories: basically the same premise. We are going to go out and set up profiles and drive people to like and recommend out site. And finally, how do we manage our social digital assets? How do we put all our digital assets on the web so people can share and enjoy them and learn more about us? The first thing is social networks. Again, as we talked about social networks everybody thinks of The Social Network, the movie. I know plenty of you have probably seen that. And everybody thinks of Facebook right away and they are the dominant player in social. But there are other ones and there are other levels of engagement. As you can see from this chart the fastest growing social networks by engagement are actually WEBO and Tumblr. Facebook is there, too, but we also have to look at where our customers, our future customers, are engaging. Once you figure that out, along the bottom you will see VK and Hi5, and there are other social networks that we want to go out and create links on. Once you have created your profile, just because you build it does not mean they will come to your site. So we need to gain likes which is the first thing you need to do. Have people like you. But more importantly than likes are shares and comments. You want to engage your social media visitors. You want them to engage with your brand. Ten thousand likes are less important than a thousand shares. You want to link in and out of your social networks back to your site, to your email. You want to link from your social site back to your site and you want a link from your site to your social sites. Also, use the features specific to each network. Meaning use video, use the tabs, use ads, use the commerce. And last of all, do not ignore the international networks. Microblogging networks, what a microblogging network to most people is is essentially Twitter. So when you look at the microblogging networks, and there are other ones out there like again WEBO, Tout, Tumblr, there are a tone of them out there. You cannot have the same message that you have on, let us say, even your social networks or your site. The microblogging networks are very non-promotional. Sales need not apply. But what you can do is be a business expert in your field. Go out there and communicate your expertise in the field. Communicate your expertise about your products. Yes, you can mix in some promotions but do not make it a ten percent sale the next – one day, a twenty percent sale the next day, and continually promote because you will not get any new followers. Use images and videos to tell our story. Go out there. There are plenty of different sites like Tout where you can post a fifteen second video, link that back to your Twitter post, posting an image on TwitPic, there is a lot of those different sites out there that will allow you to communicate so much more than the hundred and forty characters you are allowed. Finally, create your own custom hashtags. We have one for today called #mycomseo that you can actually comment on. So the difference between a hashtag and a handle is that you have a handle which is your company name or your profile name, and then you have a hashtag which communicates products, services, events. So create your hashtags and spread those amongst the social media world. Business networks: again what we are looking at here is to become a thought leader. What is a business network? What is LinkedIn? What is Zing? What is Dubai? All of us have gone to networking events where you walk around, you shake hands, you introduce yourself. What is the first thing when you meet Bob? What do you say, “Hi, Bob, you want to buy my product?” No, you do not do that at all. You get to know Bob. Bob eventually asks about your business. You ask him about your business. You might sit at a table and you are having dinner and you talk about your business. That is the same thing with LinkedIn. People think because they are not there that they can just go out and start promoting their product and that is exactly the wrong thing to do. What you need to do is communicate in groups. Create – find groups that are like to your industry. Just like you would go to a luncheon or an event that caters to your industry there are groups on these sites that cater to your industry. Participate in that group. Connect with members of that group. Share your and your company’s knowledge. And once you get to that point where you feel comfortable and you have got some trust built, and then promote your product. So as many of us saw in the first webinar series, we had penguins and – excuse me, pandas and penguins. I would be remiss without putting an animal in this presentation. So I decided to add the eight hundred pound gorilla. So what is an eight hundred pound gorilla? An eight hundred pound gorilla is one that is dominated uncontrollable because of great power that ignores a problem when everyone knows it is there but pretends everything is OK. So who is our eight hundred pound gorilla? Well, it is Google. And you know what? I love Google. I think it has done wonders for the web. But realistically let us talk about why Google is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the market. First off, when we look at Google’s market share, we ask who Googles and who searches. And why do we ask who Googles? I have commonly heard the phrase, “I’m gonna Google that,” or, “Go Google that.” When your brand name becomes a – a noun becomes synonymous with an industry you know you are the market leader. In October of 2012 this graphic was taken from, Google had sixty-six percent of all market share for searches. Think about that. Two-thirds of all the web searches on the internet went through Google. Bing was at fifteen percent. Yahoo was at fourteen percent. Obviously still very relevant. But after that this is really Google’s market. But when we are talking about Google from a social standpoint, an SEO standpoint we need to look at Google social. I love this cartoon because it kind of reiterates what Google has done with social. As we all know Google actually developed Orkut which is the top network in Brazil. Orkut was designed by – developed by design – excuse me, designed by developer in-house and his name is actually Orkut. And they took that same Orkut to the US market and it did not work. They also developed Google Wave which was a colossal flop. And then they had Google Circles but then they came up with Google+. And what happened with Google+ is they decided well, we cannot get enough adoption of this so we are going to basically – we are going to make people use it. We are going to make it number one, very powerful for SEO. Number two: we are going to open it up for brands. And then finally what they did is they said you know what? We are going to give you really great real estate space on the page if you use our Google+ profiles. So what is the power of Google+? So here is a search I did for one of my favorite organizations which is USC, Dana White and USC do a great job with all social media, particularly on Twitter but they also do a great job here you can see with Google+. What Google+ does is if you have a powerful enough profile, look at the real estate they gave to USC right here. Everything on this page is USC. This is what the ultimately brand page should look like: no competitors. It is all your information. And if you look, one of the reasons that they have – their page is so powerful is they have almost a million people in their circles. And that is a lot. But you know what? We are going to – I am going to teach you how to get – not a million pluses, a million people in your circles but we are going to try to get at least thousands of people in your circles. So the other reason we are going to talk about Google+ today is the power of Google+ direct connect. Google has actually changed their search engine to allow what is called Google+ direct connect meaning if you add a + sign to any brand or any word you are going to get the top Google+ profiles here. In this example of cars I just typed in +cars. As you can see www.cars.com comes up, www.carsdirect.com, www.carsoup.com. And guess what? Look at the background, it is blank. Isn’t that where the instant results is? Isn’t that what the paid search ads is? Isn’t that where my local dealer should be? Well, they should be but they are not. And guess what? I have a choice of four clicks. I take the top one and wala, I end up in www.cars.com’s Google+ page. And conveniently they have almost one point four million people in their circles. So again, Google will dedicate real estate towards powerful + pages. So how do we get there? Well, first off, claim your page. Recent study came out: seventy-five percent of the top one hundred brands have Google+ pages, great, seventy-five percent. What about the twenty-five percent? What are they thinking? Twenty-five percent of top brand do not own their Google+ handle. Think of the PR nightmare if a competitor or a disgruntled customer or a disgruntled employee gets a hand of that handle of your Twitter or, excuse me, of your Google+ handle. Guess what? They are going to go out there and start broadcasting, that is going to start showing up in the search engines. So what is the first thing you do today? If you do not have your Google+ page reserved go get it. Claim your page. Do that before you leave work today. Second, add a +1 button to all your sites, which we will talk about. And third, define and add to your circles. The beauty of Google+ is it is actually a really good social network. Unlike Facebook it is very easy to control where your friends are, how you see content, who you show content to. You can divide it up into friends and industries and business connections. It is really an actual nice site to use. Google+1 recommend: the Google+1 button, I think you have seen it on sites. What does the Google+ button do? Well, the +1 button helps recommend relevant content recommended by your friends. And the reason is you can only click the +1 button if you log into Google. And again, that is why we call it the eight hundred pound gorilla because everything is intertwined. So when somebody clicks that +1 button they are actually recommending you as a login friend. So that +1 has tons of power. And we talked about the difference between just a like button and a +1 button. The +1 button gets a lot more credit. When a +1 button is added to Google, a page, Google assumes it has trust. And +1 buttons are considered shares. So having +1 on your site is extremely important. So moving on away from the major networks to the bookmarking sites. So the bookmarking sites are much like the +1 button in that you can promote your site. So when social bookmarking sites started up on the web the idea was that somebody could go in, instead of hitting the bookmark button in your browser, they could bookmark you by something on the page. And so we had sites, like Digg has been around for a long time, Reddit, and Propeller and StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has what they love and they call Stumblers. And what they do is this is a built-in recommendation engine at the click of a button. So what you can do is you go out to these sites and you create a profile and put all the information on your site and then you go back and add a button to your site. This creates a high quality link. And again when we are talking about links, all these sites on the right hand side have high authority to Google, high trust levels. So when you get links coming back to this, especially if you get activity on that button in comments and ratings from the users that is extremely powerful to not only your social signals but your overall link building. Video sites: we all hear about video, video, video, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. As I talked about earlier, YouTube is actually now considered the second largest search engine in the world. I think we have heard that before. But YouTube is now considered a social media network. And the reason is that because you have subscribers, you have channel views, you can like and you can comment on video. So now YouTube is actually the third largest social network in the world. That is how important video is. So when you look at YouTube you have to say I am going to upload every video I have to YouTube. Of course you are. But there are other video sites, too, that you should pay attention to. So when we talk about the concept of driving social signals, building content, driving social content, you have to look at internationally YouHoo, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Veo, Metacafe, all these are great video search engines that will give you good social authority. Keep your videos short, less than two minutes. Tout I talked about earlier has built a whole website on fifteen second videos. Use your custom URLs and optimize with keywords. There is a whole page that you can optimize all your keywords for SEO, all your videos for SEO with keywords and content. You can also upload your transcriptions. We highly recommend subscribing to a video transcription service. Today they are actually going to transcribe my webinar here and put it online. And as I talk you can see how many times I mention social signals, how many times I mention social authority, all those types of keywords you say in your video get put on a page and they help you get found on the search engines. Finally, create a video site map. If you have videos on YouTube most likely you are going to bed them on your site. Tell the search engines where they are. Again, that creates that connection between YouTube and your site. And conveniently, did I mention before, guess who owns YouTube? Google. Image sites: pictures are worth a thousand words. That is a saying. Pictures are also worth a thousand shares. Everybody loves images. Images convey a powerful message about your brand. I am going to challenge all of you right now if you are online go to Google image site or go to Yahoo images or Bing images and search your brand. See what comes up from an image search. I bet you are not going to be happy with it because nobody has thought about controlling their image inventory. So you generally have thousands if not millions of images on your servers. Find a good hundred images, a good selection, not all product shots and people using your products, some images that people submitted, people – images from charitable events that you have done, upload those to the image sites. On the side there I have the top ten image sites: Flickr, Photobucket, I mentioned TwitPic earlier, Shutterfly. You have heard of those. And again, create that profile, participate in the forum, engage in those conversations. Those image sites used to just show images, they are now social sites. They allow people to comment on your images. Plus Pinterest. We have all heard of Pinterest. Pinterest is going to become the eight hundred pound gorilla of the image world because they have created a different way to display images by being able to pin people’s images from a site onto an image site and then create your own board and communicate that board and share that board and converse about that board. Pinterest is the new generation of image sites. Infographics: infographics are relatively new, couple years old but infographics are essentially images on steroids. Infographics are appealing and easy to digest. You can see the image on the right and in fact I did pull a lot of my information for this deck from that image on the right. Infographics take a complex process and break it down. And infographics are light and shared on social media at a very high rate. Most of the people on the call right now are from the software industry. One of the challenges around software is that it is hard to sell your product because you have to explain what your product does. Not only you have to explain what your product does, you have to explain what your product does against your customer’s product, right? So most the time I went out and I went to a lot of software sites. I went to a lot of software review sites and it was the same thing for everybody: here are the benefits. Here are the features. Here is the operating system. Here is why our product is better. It was just big blocks of copy that nobody is going to read. Nobody really reads the web. Everybody skims the web. So infographics allow people to digest large pieces of information with a combination of imagery and copy. Create an infographic, put it out on your social sites. Allow people to download it. Allow people to share it. Infographics are very powerful. Other social content: so when we talk to clients we talk to people about the things we are talking about today: digital assets and blogging and all this stuff. They are like, “You know, I have too much to do. I’m runnin’ my business. I don’t have all this content.” And we’re like _____ [0:25:36] we are like, “You know what? You really do.” It might not be sitting on the desk like hers is but it is in your local – it is in your drive, it is on your server. I guarantee you you have videos. You have webinars. You have white papers. You have PDFs. You have PowerPoint presentations. You have eBooks, you have podcasts. You have all this information that you have collected, sales sheets that are not on the web that you can share. But you will say to me, well, how do you share, what kind of site would take all that stuff? Well, there is one and there are more than one. But the one we are going to recommend today is called slide share. Slide share is the site for sharing these types of documents. It started out as just sharing PowerPoints but has moved on and realized that people want to share white papers. They want to share PDFs. It allows you to create your own personal profile or a business profile and share your documents. People can come in and look them. You can allow them to download them. Of course it downloads in a form that they cannot pirate and use themselves but it allows them to learn about you and use the information. Moving on from links that we have created, so I just basically walked through how you can create links and how you can optimize those links and those profiles. But this part we are going to talk about links you have to ask for and earn. So when you are talking about true social link building we did create some powerful links, but what the search engines are looking for and what builds your overall authority is the links you earn. So going out there and asking people to link to you and really that is the power of social ink building. So when we look at blogging, I know that blogging is not allowed everywhere. And I know there are a number of countries that do not allow it. So for the countries that do blogging produces relevant keyword rich content. It drives links. It increases your social shares, and it really what it is best at is the content sharing. So what the search engines, and part of their two hundred point algorithm is how much your site is updated. And one of the ways to update your site is blogs. And the beauty of blogs and how it intertwines with everything we are doing with SEO is that if you write a long blog you can post the first paragraph out at Facebook or you can post the first paragraph out at these different places and then drive it back to your blog and say read more. So you can go out to Twitter and say I just posted a blog on Content is King: What is Queen? And I can drive it back to this video webinar. So you can do it for videos. So there is an enormous amount of content that you can blog about. Online PR: PR agencies have been around forever. And social media is probably terrifying to them. And a lot of the moved into it aggressively. But a lot of them are still not doing it right. So what we have to look at is the SEO social and PR marriage meaning PR has been used historically as press releases. Well, what social is just it is just online PR. It is just virtual – it is just word of mouth PR. So really when we are looking at PR as an SEO tool we have to look at it as what do we do with that press release that used to just be four paragraphs and would go out and we would sent it to the major high end distribution service and they would print it? Well, not it is all about driving links back to the site, driving quality content and not abusing press releases, but really when you look at a press release, write for the journalists, that is what we used to always do. But now you have to write for the journalists, you have to embed it with keywords to write for the search engine. You have to make it engaging for your customer, the prospect, social media. So what I suggest is take a look at your press releases. Talk to your PR agency. See what kind of social skills they have. And optimize that for SEO via the keywords and links. Because again, those press releases can be a great tool to drive users and links back to your site. Reviews: so I know I am again using the software industry for an example. Reviews are very important in making one person decide a product versus the other. So what your reviews do is they provide fresh unique content. And one of the things that benefit for SEO the most, and we see it all the time when we are doing ad words and we are doing SEO, is product name plus reviews. So if you sell online backup software you love to come up for online – excuse me, online backup software reviews and you want to rank for that term. Reviews mean increased conversion rates. A study came out that showed any product that receives over fifty reviews has a four point six percent increase in conversion rate. If you look at getting fifty reviews that may be hard. But even look at getting ten reviews, three percent. Any reviews help your product. So what you want to do is you want to go on and get reviews. How do we get reviews? Well, first off, let us go out to the sites. You can submit your product to sites and in the software industry, again, I listed some of the main players up here: CNET, PCMag, those type of things. So really what these do is they have user generated reviews, editorial reviews, and I know a lot of you use them to get the free downloads of your products so they can try them, the trialware. What they do is they also provide links back to the site from these high authority sites. And what you can do within these review sites is you can build your keyword density. So by giving them a really good robust description of your product, well, and they will put it on their site because they are just as interested in selling your product as you are, again, that builds that keyword density. It builds those links back to your site. Another powerful ways to get reviews is on-site. So if you put reviews on your site the customers are featured directly in the purchase path. And reviews help drive sales as we have seen with the chart before. And reviews help companies improve their own products. On this example from Dell, Dell did a case study where they tracked all the reviews on-site and they determined that any review under four stars had to go back to QA, it had to go back to production and manufacturing again to improve that product so that it was either getting a four and a half or a five star. Plus again when we talk about that content turn reviews create that new content on the site. List reviews: this is kind of a new advent but I have seen a lot more of this, particularly used by affiliates but it is used by a lot of people that are just trying to sort out a really muddled market for people. So you guys have all seen the best of, the top tens, the top twenties, the top five, whatever it is. Basically they take your products and they review you and create a matrix. And the review sites compare the products and then offer them to buy. They might write their own review. They might get user generated reviews. But again they compare your products, they drive back relevant information. Again, drive back to your site. So find those list sites. Go out and find those top ten sites and submit your product. A lot of times the top ten sites are based on maybe the fact is there is only ten people in the industry, maybe it is a very competitive industry and they have an affiliate program. Regardless, reach out to these people. Try to get your product listed. Talking about reviews in general, the main thing we want you to do is engage your customers and ask them to review you. Reviews are powerful. Reviews build trust. Reviews are very important for closing sales. Ask for reviews. And you know what? Bad reviews are OK. There is no company that should have a one hundred percent or a five star review. So if you get a few bad reviews, I mean, people panic. They are like I do not want to put reviews on my site, what if somebody says something bad about my product? Fine, you know what? If you have ten good reviews to every one bad review that is good. And you know what? If you have a bad review, go and engage that person on social media and provide great customer service. And those people say you know what? Every one of us has had a bad experience even with the best of brands, right? I have had an iPhone die in three months. It happens to everybody. You know what? You go back and you remember the customer service more than you remember the bad experience. Crows source links: user generated content. So this is another way you ask for links and you ask for content. What you are doing is most companies have tons of brand advocates, of evangelists. There are people that love your brand. And you know what? We have to take advantage of the people that love our brand. So when we go out let us ask them for testimonials. Ask them to make videos. Ask them for images. Ask them to pin _____ [0:32:54] for your Pinterest. Put out some contests. You have to engage them. If you just ask them and say, “Hey, review us,” probably not going to do it. Put together an eContest, give away some product. Give away something that is – maybe give away a tablet that is related to your product, something like that. Finally, with social link building: the avoid. The dreaded Google sandbox I am sure you have heard of. Basically what we want to avoid just as Adam covered in the first seminar is we want to avoid link farms. We want to avoid – if somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, I can get you a thousand links overnight,” run for the hills, right. You want quality links. You do not want link dilution meaning you want to focus on one domain and drive high quality links to that domain. A lot of things we talked about earlier are going to drive those high quality links. Go through your links. Prune any links that are bad. Try to get rid of those links. And you know what? Avoid the _____ [0:33:43]. Avoid what we call link spam. Do not just go out there and comment on a post or comment on something with a link on a blog. You are going to get banned and it is not a good thing for linking. Finally, when we look at content overall, we look at content is king. We talked about social content is queen. And they are married. And why does that matter? Well, because you need to share your content. Basically what is going to differentiate you from another brand is your social. So if you have a brand that is older or you are trying to appeal to a younger audience sharing is a great way to do it. And by sharing content I took what I would say is quite an overzealous sharing here by mashable because they have every button and link possible online. But again what they are trying to do is capture the fact that whether you are on StumbleUpon or Pinterest or LinkedIn or Google+ or you are on RSS feed or whatever they want to make sure that you can like their product. There are ways to make your page look better than this. I am not saying this is the best practice. But what we are saying is use something like AddThis. There are a lot of programs out there that you can add social buttons to your website and allow people to like whatever their particular network is whether it is a network, a microblogging site, whether it is a social bookmarking site, whatever it may be. Finally, when you get your social _____ [0:34:56] pages, social visitors different. So if you decide you want to drive back visitors from your social sites you have got to remember they are coming from a very non-promotional peer driven site. The first thing they do not want to see is everything is on sale Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. They do not want to see the overzealous promotion. What they want to see is they want to build some trust with the brand. They want to see quality content. You need to educate the social customer, not just sell to them. And finally, you need to define your calls to action and your content. What do you want your social user to do? Do you want them to follow the same path as an organic visitor? You want them to follow the same path as a page search visitor or somebody who types in your URL because they saw it on a billboard? You have got to treat – and I would recommend that to every person that reaches your site should reach a different page based on where they came from. So we have talked about how we create and increase our social signals, how we increase our links, how we build content, and all this is going to benefit you from an SEO standpoint. And all this is going to create social signals and that churn that the search engines are looking for. But is there a benefit beyond this? I mean, this is a lot of work, I realize it. I imagine right now a lot of people are scratching their heads and pulling their hair going oh my God, I can barely handle My Facebook and Twitter, let alone a whole bunch of these social bookmark sites and image sites and infographics. But there is a bigger benefit than just the SEO piece. Number one is just social authority. So going social, going global social, engage those people on your social networks. Build that social content. Share the content and build links which will create a buzz about your brand, products, and services. If you look at that website there or excuse me, that image on the side, your website – you are going to get your traditional traffic from Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing. But you look around and all those other sites want to send you traffic. Why are you turning that traffic down? Those are all referral sites of sorts and great sources of content, excuse me. Finally the wallpaper effect. I could do a whole other hour on searching your reputation management. But what this – what this all does is it creates a wallpaper effect for your brand. When we looked at USC earlier I showed you the top part of that picture. Look at the rest of the image here. You can see that this brand has organic listing, Google+, news, they have got Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia all on the front page. That is the perfect brand page, that is what you want to look like. And it may not be those exact sources. You may not _____ [0:37:16]. And I know that we are not out there – we are not all USCs out there. But what we can do is you can define your niche. You could become that brand if you use social. You can get that Google+ big piece of real estate up in the top right hand corner if you built out everything. And really what you are doing is you are directing links from the social profiles they index on the first page. I talked about slideshow earlier, we had somebody we worked with that totally loaded up a bunch of content and optimized the slide share page and in two weeks it was on the front page of Google. That is how powerful some of these networks are. Finally, your take-aways: mobilize your site for your growing mobile focused audience. Create an M commerce path that drives your mobile visitor to – define a call to action. Drive links, authority, and signals by engaging your customers socially. Particularly in this industry earn your reviews on your site and referral sites. Socialize your site through sharing, creating, and disseminating social content. I have posted some helpful links here and we will also go through some of this with questions. But essentially these links are meant to help you optimize your mobile site, some information on responsive web design. I have a list of the top social networks out there and that is great for finding international networks and niche networks, those types of things. Social back links: you want to see how many social links you have now? Go to open site explorer, it is a SEO _____ [0:38:39] product does a great job of showing you all your back links. Search metrics for social: drop your URL in there you will actually get a grade for your social, not a true grade but it will show you kind of your health. Social bookmarking sites: again I mentioned Reddit, Propeller, Digg, StumbleUpon, there is a bunch of then out there. Slide Share, go and set up a Slide Share profile today. Tout I think is the new generation of video marketing: fifteen second quick testimonial videos. The quicker the video the more likely people are to watch them. Finally: review aggregation sources. And finally if content is king the queen is authority. Build your web presence through social SEO. Thank you and I think we are going to move on to questions now. Chris Hoell: Yes, thank you Mike. As a reminder, if you do have any question feel free to post them in the chat box or you can also post them on Twitter using the hashtag on the screen that you see now. We will turn it over to questions. Sahra Ashton: We have quite a few questions today. If we do not get through them all we will be posting them to our blog this afternoon: www.mycommerce.com/blog. Now let us get started to our first question. For a small business I do not have the time to take on a blog, social, and mobile. Is there any one of these I could or should focus my attention on? Which would be more beneficial? Mike McAnally: That is a great question. As far as small business, if you are in a country that allows blogging I would start with blogging. I think it is the most effective way to disseminate content and get out there. You can write blogs and connect those all with your social media networks. If you – if blogging is not allowed then I would really suggest tackling the social media networks and those microblogging sites and those bookmarking sites. Go out and build up whether it is on Renren or WEBO or whatever it happens to be, VK, Hi5, whatever that social network is in your country or the country that you are doing business in, go out and blow out that profile and really participate. Just because you build a profile does not mean people are going to come to it. You really need to work on it. Sahra Ashton: Thank you. Going on to our next question: how can B2B companies take advantage of social media? Which sites or strategies should they focus on? Mike McAnally: You know what, that is a great question because I have – we work with some people and there are manufacturing companies and everything that say I make a product that nobody is ever going to care for on Facebook. And you know what? There are networks that are better for others. Obviously those business networks is a good first place to start. Really if you are a B2B company odds are you are trying to buy leads. But still really social media is global and everybody is participating in global media. Just because you make a boring product does not mean there is a group of engineers out there that are not looking for information on it. So obviously target certain networks that are more B2B focused but you should still be everywhere. Sahra Ashton: Earlier in the presentation you mentioned pinning on Pinterest. What is Mike McAnally: Pinterest is the new advent of image sharing sites. And what Pinterest allows you to do is not only upload your images but if you create boards and that is what Pinterest is really founded on. So if you look at the old days when we used to put pictures on the refrigerator or pin a picture on a bulletin board, that is really what Pinterest is. You create your own board. So you can create a board for a wedding that is coming up. You can create a board for an interest you have. And then once people follow your board if they go to a site and they see an image they like or they see something on social media they can pin that image to the board. And Pinterest creates great links back to your site. And again when we talked about the links that you earn, Pinterest is one of those ones because you have user generated content. The people on Pinterest are doing all the work for you. You are not pushing your images out. Sahra Ashton: Going on to the next question: it seems that most of the articles or information I would want to share or blog has already been covered multiple times. Why should I blog about something that seems to be covered from every angle already? Mike McAnally: You know what/ I talked in big numbers earlier. This is probably the one million five hundred thousand SEO presentation that has been out there. And it has probably been rehashed a hundred times. You are right there is a lot of information out there. And everything has probably been written out once. But you know what? That does not mean you cannot put a certain spin on it. If you read something that is really good for let us say SEO and you want to put a spin on it for your industry, put your opinion out there. And in fact, if people will listen to you, if they know you or they are connected to you and give that little higher credibility than let us just say a general article. So we always recommend going out there, writing a blog, going out there, and sharing your opinion. That is really what it is about. Nobody can call your opinion wrong. They just may disagree with you or they may have a different opinion of it. So definitely get out there and just start writing. Do not cut and paste somebody’s content as yours. Obviously do not do that but share your opinion, get it out there and write. Sahra Ashton: Earlier in the presentation you mentioned that Google is dominant in the market. Is it safe to assume that if content is ranking well on Google it will do the same on Bing or Yahoo? Mike McAnally: If you do well on Google odds are you are pretty well optimized site and you are going to do well on the other search engines. But Bing and Yahoo have set up tools that in fact will allow you to use their web master tools, to use some of their site map submission technology, things like that. So you definitely want to treat Bing and Yahoo with a little more care than just Google because if you noticed when we showed the market share, combined they have thirty percent of the market compared to sixty-six percent. I do not think any of us want to give up two-thirds of the market. Sahra Ashton: Are there any social sites that focus on specific groups of people like teachers or dentists? If so is there a reference point for these types of sites? Mike McAnally: Yes there is. There are thousands of social networks out there. In fact, we were finding asocial networks for our client. We found a network of nurses that had over two hundred thousand nurses on it. We have also found fitness sites, people who have certain interests in fitness, that have thousands of people. When it comes to social networking yes, you know what? There nine hundred million profiles on Facebook. But i would rather, if I am trying to communicate with nurses or _____ [0:44:52] nurses I would rather have network of two hundred thousand nurses than nine hundred million people on Facebook and try to wade that. So yes, there is pretty much a social network for everything. And you know what? If you do not have a social network for your industry, create one. Sahra Ashton: Great, thank you. It looks like we have time for one more question. In your presentation you touched on transcription services. What should I look for when selecting a transcription company? Mike McAnally: There are a lot of transcriptions out there. I think you have to look at what you are trying to accomplish through the video transcription meaning they are transcribing this today into a number of different language. So it will depend on transcribing the service, how much it is to transcribe each video and then what you want to do with it, that transcription. So if you want to convert it to other languages you are probably going to have to look for a multi-language multi-cultural transcription service. I think there are some that are a bunch out there. You have to do your research. And again, one of the things I would do research on is look out there and find reviews. Find their social media presence. Make sure you trust those people before you let them transcribe because I will tell you what: if somebody transcribes my video into a foreign language I am not going to be able to read through and determine if it is right. And I want to make sure they are not just throwing it into some software. I want to make sure that there are people doing it. And just like any other business, that is what I would recommend. Chris Hoell: Mike, great, thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us. I do want to say have a good rest of your day or night depending on where you are. As a reminder I will be posting all about the questions and Mike’s answers onto our blog later on either this afternoon or going on into tomorrow. Also we will be posting a recording of the webinar onto our YouTube page some time next week. So feel free to bookmark that site and pay attention. If there are any other questions, again, feel free to email myself or tweet them off using the hashtag below. Once again thank you all for joining us and you have a good rest of your day. Mike McAnally: Thank you and again reach out to us on Twitter, the hashtag is up there and my handle and thank you gain for your time. [End of audio]