SEO 101

Using Social Media to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Jeff Quipp joins Ross Dunn to discuss the advantages of Twitter and how social media can help your site's rankings. Jeff and Ross give in-depth examples of how Twitter has helped link build and add targeted traffic to sites as well as build solid communities. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 27m
Broadcast on:: 23 Mar 2009
Audio Format:: other

Jeff Quipp joins Ross Dunn to discuss the advantages of Twitter and how social media can help your site's rankings. Jeff and Ross give in-depth examples of how Twitter has helped link build and add targeted traffic to sites as well as build solid communities.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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And do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Force Web Marketing, and unfortunately I have bad news to start the show with. My co-host, Jennifer Evans-Laycock, has made the tough decision to leave the show to make room for her busy schedule. She will really be missed and I hope somebody will get to work with her again. I know she added a great dimension to the show and I know there is potential in the future to get her back on so I am really hoping that does happen. But on the show, today we have a special guest, Jeff Quip, CEO of Search Engine People, Inc. a respected web marketing company based out of Toronto, Canada. He is here to help us understand how social marketing can help with search engine rankings. How are you doing today, Jeff? Good. Thanks, Ross. How about you? Great. I am very glad to have you on your show. Thanks for coming. Especially short notice. Thanks for having me. So, tell me essentially, I guess for the benefit of the listeners, let's just, why don't you just explain what is social media? What are we talking about here? Social media as far as search is concerned, at least to me, I mean to everybody, it has a different meaning. But to me, it is the ability to create awareness of content that we create. You know, a big part of search and doing well within search is having good content on your website. And so, of course, that's a big role of SEOs and the like, everybody in the industry really, to try and create content that A, will attract good quality visitors that will ultimately turn into clients, but B, that will also attract links because obviously links are a big part of the algorithms of a lot of the major search engines. And when I say links, I mean links from other websites for those who are unfamiliar with the concept. And so, the way that I look at it is, you know, it is a multifunction role. Part of the job is to create all of this great quality content, whether it be widgets, whether it be images, videos, unique research, news. And the second part of it is creating awareness of that great content. So, I guess it is akin to the old thing. You know, you can build a better mouse trap, but will be a path to your door? Not necessarily. So, that is where social media comes in. It allows us to help to create awareness of that content out and across the web. Now, in its finest form, I suppose, like in most general format, social media, I mean, where people know that Twitter, Facebook, Dig, stumble upon Reddit, I assume Reddit would be part of that being like Dig. That was essentially started to, let's say Twitter, let's use that as an example. Twitter was started as just a method of communication that was kind of fun and short. And it was interesting. It was like, I guess, a lot of things online originally just started out as something fun. And now, of course, all us guys are trying to find ways to make it work for businesses. So, you know, with all these different places, and they all have different characteristics, don't they? Yes, they do. Absolutely. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of how it can be used for search and SEO. So, which ones would, let's say, well, first of all, I realize it's a massive field. But in general, how can it help with search and ranking? You mentioned links, so obviously, getting these links from people, essentially, they're using the social media to, or you're using the social media to raise awareness to your content to get further links. Is that the only dimension of improving search engine rankings? Well, I think in creating awareness of that content, if it truly is really good content and it's able to go hot on, let's say, a dig or on a Reddit or on a stumble upon a certain percentage of those people are going to want to blog about the content, because keep in mind, the content is good quality. And the more people that we can get to talk about that content and link to it, the more powerful that content becomes in terms of its ability to rank in the search results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are other benefits as well. I mean, part of it is, let's say, for example, you are a restaurant or you've got a restaurant and one of the things that you do is you have a $2,600 martini for argument's sake. That's interesting and a lot of people across the web will find that interesting. And a certain percentage of those who come across the story in social media will link to it and they'll start to talk about it, which, of course, helps the restaurant to rank better in the search results and at the same time, it now helps them become an authority on the topic of mixed drinks, perhaps different drinks that will go with different dinner menu items. So, really, it works on a number of levels, social media. So, in case a lot of listeners know that Google is a big part of its algorithm is reputation. Being the person, the big guy in a field, or your website is obviously an authority site. It's got a good reputation according to Google. It's going to do that much better. It's going to have the potential to do that much better. And what you're saying is essentially all this content that's out there, you raise awareness to it and this content will then also serve to boost the reputation of your website and all of the states own content as well. I think that definitely makes a lot of sense. Now, when it comes down to, let's say, for example, I'm about to do some social media marketing for an event that's coming up with charity. I would say that that's another angle as well, right? It's a good place to raise awareness for not just content for actually events that would be popular and perhaps viral. Have you used it that way? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I think depending on the social media that you use, Twitter is used very, very frequently to create awareness of various events for charities. And again, you could also use dig, Reddit, stumble upon to create awareness. The content that you create would have to be really unique in order to hope for success there. And of course, it's becoming more and more difficult to have a submission go hot on dig these days just for various reasons. One of the reasons being they're changing the algorithm. But yeah, stumble upon, I'm sorry, stumble upon dig, Reddit. Doesn't work well for charities, Twitter seems to be a really good option in this day and age. Funny, the way it changes its algorithm so much it sort of reminds me of the old days of the search engines. You know, Google's doing the Google dance. Now it's the big dance. Very much so. And to be honest, I mean, it really all comes down to trust. How much trust do they have in the site? We've done a little research ourselves about dig's algorithm. And sites that have had a lot of hot submissions in the past will find typically that it's easier to have one of their stories go hot in the future. So to some extent, it's all about trust with dig as well, much as it is with Google. Interesting. So thinking on a perspective of this event thing, I think it's really intriguing to me. I know the process of building content is quite powerful and building interest in it. But I'm seeing more and more people advertising certain things going on and building hype around it. Now one of the things I found the other day, and I'm actually going to hope that you remember the address here, it's a way to find Twitters in your local area. What is that site? Do you know what I'll find by chance? In your local area? Yeah, I can actually just came across the site, I'm sorry, came across the site today. Lee Oden had Twittered about it. And it's twitter.mailaina.com and I believe it does that as well. And where mailaina is spelled M-A-I-L-A-N-A.com, it's a pretty interesting tool. It's a Twitter visualization tool, but it allows you to delve in and see who's in your area, Twittering as well. I'm not sure about it, I mean really, a lot of cases you would want to only, you'd want at least focus to make sure you're following, and hopefully they're following you, people in your local area, because if it's a local charity or a local event, that's a great way to do it. Now all these little things are popping up right left and center, all these different applications, I'm finding it a bit of a whirlwind. Other than this one, perhaps, what other great tools have you noticed popping up lately for Twitter? Or managing any of these, like I noticed some of them all across post, there are certain applications, like I just loaded twirl on my computer, I mean I'm talking the whole wide range, I mean anything could be used for dig. I like that these programs are being created that help you manage all these social profiles. Anything like that come to mind? Not that we use very frequently, I mean there's, as you mentioned, Twitter right now is a whirlwind because people are starting to figure out how they can use it to benefit businesses or to benefit themselves. For example, you know some people will use Twitter to promote their site or their business. Other people will use it to keep in touch with friends, yet others will use it to get real time referrals from friends. So I didn't inform a poll on Twitter the other day asking people, you know, what do you use Twitter for? And if you were looking for let's say a local physician or a local restaurant, would you be more inclined to use Google or Twitter? And about 60 to 70 percent of people, obviously Twitter users responded saying they would be more inclined to use Twitter to find a local business because it's a referral and they trust the referee as opposed to Google where they're not exactly sure how the search results are organized. Yeah, we were talking about that the other day, it's really interesting that that could be the case. Now one thing I brought up and I guess it depends really on the market. I mean we're obviously quite savvy and we know exactly what built Google's rankings. So a lot of other people however, they may think that those rankings are built through trust. What do you say to that? Oh, absolutely. I mean any research that I've seen in the past has suggested that, you know, if Google ranks you number one for a specific keyword term, that those who don't necessarily know that, you know, Google results can be altered, absolutely believe that, you know, the omnipotent Google has deemed this site to be the best match for that particular keyword. It's amazing and really there's still so much, I mean, I still constantly run the people who don't even know what search engines are important for websites. I mean, it's funny how we're dealing with such a diverse crowd now all the way from people who just don't have a really understanding yet of the Internet to these vastly advanced people who want services as well. How do you find you deal with that in terms of creating a process for helping them with social media and ranking, you find it pretty difficult to satisfy everyone? You know what? Yes, we do find it really difficult in this day and age because a lot of companies don't think that they have the time to build the content necessary. So in a lot of cases, unless you're dealing with a very large company, you know, the company, they're already stretched. Resources are already stretched and if you try and mention that the idea of we need to create some really good content, you can see the hair is kind of on their back stand up and their shoulder shrug. They don't think that they have the resources to create content and so it's difficult in that respect. Well, I think a lot of our listeners are probably still wondering and I just came back to this and sort of taking a step back. How often do they have to be online and in the social media space to make this stuff work? I mean, it sounds all encompassing and I know when I first heard about social media and I was getting into it, I was like, I don't know, I've got barely any time as it is, you know, is it worth putting in all this time and just how much time do they need to put in, do you think to make an effect if they've got good content already? That's a great question. I guess, I mean, as with anything, there are easy ways to do it and there are more difficult ways to do it. On the easier end, we can create more entertainment type posts where it's the SEO themselves that can do that and then try and get those posts to go hot on, you know, a dig or a reddit or a stumble upon. It's still good content and it doesn't require a whole lot of the business's time but that's getting more and more difficult so now it's becoming, I mean, ideally you can delve more into creating really, really good content and authoritative content but of course if you create authoritative content, we as SEOs knowing very little about their business, we need their input and ultimately, I mean, they're the authorities, they know the most about their own space so we need their input. So more and more, we're just trying to guide them in the content creation process, even tell them the types of content that we need created and how to structure it but we need the basic answers from them. So that's really one of the challenges, the big challenges I think in the industry right now and in social media is trying to get the businesses to buy in and to be able to commit that kind of time and resources necessary to create all that great content that will help their site rank better for relevant terms. Great, thank you. Well, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to touch on a little more of what you can do to make social media work for you. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com brought to you by Engine Ready. Turn your underperforming landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Conversion credit tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. You don't have to be an expert to use Engine Ready's conversion credit tools but you'll feel like a landing page pro, take the guesswork out of increasing your conversion rate, visit conversioncredit.com and boost your conversion rate for free. That's www.conversioncredit.com. Have a good weekend Andy! Hey Jan, why are all the coders leaving so early? Doesn't your department have a deadline of like midnight or something? Me and my staff are here all night. I saved money on my staffing budget by outsourcing a lot of work to offshoring.com. I told them I needed a coder and they sent me profiles fast. My staff just filled in the little details and now we're having margarita night. Offshoring.com, fast and expensive, excellent and on time offshoring.com. Okay class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on wedmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on wedmasterradio.fm with myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my guest today, Jeff Quit, he's with Search Engine People Inc out of Toronto, Ontario. Before the break we were discussing social media marketing and really how a business can work with a company to help their social media or actually make social media work for them without spending too much of their own time. Now to that end, Jeff, I'm wondering say a person isn't going to hire a company and they're doing this in-house and you know what it's like and what we both do when you're building a business, you've only got a finite amount of time. Do you think that social media is important enough that they need to find the time or should they stick with other marketing processes that may be a little simpler to do and take less time? Good question. Ultimately I think social media is an extension of SEO, I do and the reason being a big part of SEO is in content creation. So creating content that is unique, that is important, that's useful and really social media is a means of being able to promote that content and I mean it's a cost effective means of being able to promote content. You know in the old days we would have had to use newspaper so put out large sums of money for newspaper, radio, television, even PR to some extent. But now social media can assume that role and I mean if you're good at it and you know what kind of content people are looking for, you can use social media to create awareness of that content which in turn will result in a lot of links and help you rank better within the search results of the major engines. Okay so it really does pay to at least have one foot in the door in social media and if that was the case which service would you use if you had to pick one? Wow. You know what, I couldn't pick one because it's really going to be unique to the goals and the objectives of the company themselves. And even the type of business that they're in, I mean if you look at DIG you'll note that there are certain types of stories that people like on DIG so it's typically a younger audience who like science and technology that sort of thing. Stumble upon can be used as well but again you know they're different, it's a different crowd and different purposes. They're looking for different types of information. They're not as inclined to link as let's say DIG users but you know it's got a role as well. And now Twitter, I mean Twitter's got a great role in helping to promote content. Yeah I think what I like about Twitter so much is you can really network. I mean it's fantastic to be with the people in your own crowd and you start to realize just how big your business might be or your industry and you get ideas from them. I find that really helpful like some fascinating stuff comes through on Twitter. In fact one of them I actually found about that the local stuff, there's two of them. It's not the one I was looking at earlier but is twitterlocal.net, Twitterlocal.net is one of the ones for local. Another one is Twellow. I'm not sure where they got that one from but anyway, TW, E-L-L-O-W. And neither of these I tried but they were mentioned in some write ups I was just scanning through. So you know these are the kind of things that would just pop up on Twitter and I think that's really cool. And then yes you can just pump out something saying you know I've got this article you might be interested in it's on this and as long as you're upfront about it being your own you should be okay. Would you say that's within Twitter etiquette doing something like that? Yeah I mean you don't want to promote your own content with on Twitter very often. You want to talk about lots of different things. I mean it's even helpful to have kind of a segmented following or follow different segments of different groups of people. You know one of the things that I like to use Twitter for is to ask for referrals. So if and again this is going back to kind of the question that I had the informal Twitter poll that I had the other day but you know if I'm looking for a Japanese restaurant in Toronto go to Twitter and ask a group of my Toronto area friends you know which Japanese restaurant would you go to or if I'm looking for a car and I want to ask the differences between you know a GM car, a Honda and a Toyota and the same price point. You know there are certain friends that I have that are very informed about cars and I trust their opinion though it's a great way to get answers from them as well. So it's not just I wouldn't use it to just self promote but also to gain information and referrals. Oh definitely. And one of the things I really like doing is retweeting and telling people about what I've just seen. This is really cool or comment you know I find it's like anything like leaving a comment on a person's blog if you want to just note this is great I think this is very interesting and start offering kind of an intelligent answer and really contributing to their blog that's appreciated too. So Jeff we've got to wrap up pretty quickly here but I'm just wondering are there any properties you think that are going to be competing in the realm of you know the Twitters and the digs that's coming up in the upcoming ones? That's really difficult to say I mean I think that there will be a lot more vertical type social media that will surface so you know I think as more and more people come online the critical mass will start to reach the critical mass and that will be possible. But right now I mean it's Twitter seems to be all the rage and there's just so many new applications you know developing in so many new ways to use Twitter that for me it's the most fun right now and holds the most potential. I quite agree. Well thank you. Now I just wanted to mention what's your Twitter name in case anyone wants to know and follow you. It's Jay Quip Q U I P P is in Peter. Great. Minds Ross Dunn ROSF UNN and thank you very much Jeff. It's been a pleasure having you on a show today and hopefully we can get you back on again soon. That sounds good. Thanks Ross. Thank you and thank you everyone for joining us on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Force Web Marketing and my guest Jeff. Thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.fm. [Music] You should be saving for the future but savings accounts suck and investing can be scary. We combine the ease of savings with the real returns of investing. 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