Essentials of Combining Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing Tactics…04.15.09

This is an excerpt from a good posting today on Mashable! titled Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success by Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor at Online Marketing Blog:

“…Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a road map that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach (and can measure) as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan…

SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media road map:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers…

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search…

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share…

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content…Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results…marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts…”

Why is Search Engine Optimization Important to Librarians?…12.15.08

Lorcan Dempsey‘s post from Thursday “SEO” [
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001836.html
] which is excerpted here draws attention to the increasing importance of search engine optimization for libraries and librarians:

“…I have mentioned SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a few times as an increasingly important area of interest for librarians. However, as I have suggested, I come across resistance on the grounds that this is some sort of base or mendacious activity. We are very interested in interoperability, however, and for this reason it may be that Search Engine Interoperability is a more palatable expression. In this case interoperability means managing resources in ways which promote effective crawling, indexing and ranking by search engines. A reasonable goal, given the importance of search engines in the lives of library users.

Anyway, I repeat these points prompted by a post by Tony Hirst on the topic.

What does information literacy mean in the age of web search engines? I’ve been arguing for some time (e.g. in The Library Flip) that one of the core skills going forward for those information professionals who “help people find stuff” is going to be SEO – search engine optimisation. Why? Because increasingly people are attuned to searching for “stuff” using a web search engine (you know who I’m talking about…;-); and if your “stuff” doesn’t appear near the top of the organic results listing (or in the paid for links) for a particular query, it might as well not exist… [Revisiting the Library Flip - Why Librarians Need to Know About SEO « OUseful.Info, the blog…]

It is useful to think about the library website in this context. It is also important for materials which are unique to an institution/library: archival collections, institutional repositories, etc. It is also interesting to think about subject or other liaisons, or specialist library services, or advisory/reference materials…”

Search Engine Optimization Guide from Google…11.17.08

Stephen Abram’s post on Google’s Search Optimization Post  [
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/11/search_engine_o.html
] contained the following useful information which can help anyone:

“Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, ‘What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?’ There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, ‘I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?’, we can say, ‘Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.’

Since libraries don’t serve their customers by allowing and encouraging manipulation of the search rankings by advertisers, politicians and other special interest groups, we need to understand how the performance and positioning of our OPACs, databases and licensed resources differ from public search engines with revenue models designed to serve their primary customers – the folks paying the bills.

OF COURSE, That shouldn’t stop you from optimizing your library websites to get higher local rankings!!”