Skip to content

Your Search Results, Now With Social Media Influences

27 March 2011, 12:49 pm

Did you know that you can now tailor your Google search results to be more relevant to you based on your social media interactions? I didn’t! This recently announced feature cropped up yesterday as I was researching the answer to a student’s question about aggregating social media accounts in search results after my guest lecture at an NYU graduate class.

Apparently you can now connect one or more of your social media accounts to your Google Account profile. Having done this, every time you search the web using Google, the results you see will be tailored by the content in your social network: what you’ve said, and what others in your network have said or recommended. Read this excellent post I found on how Google will now blend your social network interactions as part of the overall Google search results algorithm.

The changing SEO landscape

What does this mean for those trying to optimize their sites for search results? In some ways this may be bad news. This presents another way that your site may disappear off people’s search results (or at least get placed lower in the ranking) in favor of something that one of their friends may have tweeted about or posted to their Facebook wall.

On the other hand, as with other personalized search results changes, if you are building an engaged audience through not only blog posts with comments, but also with social media, your followers/likers/friends may be more likely to see and be directed towards your site than before because of their social network connections.

It will be interesting to see how many people embrace this somewhat quietly rolled-out Google change.

What do you think? Will you add your social network to your Google profile? If you’ve done this, does it seem to present better search results for you?

Filed under Optimizing your web presence. Tagged , ,
Comments Off

Your (search) results may vary…

27 March 2011, 8:34 am

For a given search query, does everyone see the same results? For Google, at least, the answer is “no”. From a search engine optimization perspective, this is important to keep in mind. So, for example, when you say “my goal is to be listed on the first page”, my follow-up question would be “whose first page”.

Personalized Search

The fact is that since 2007, Google started to personalize the results you see when you search. At the start, this was mostly for Google account owners. In other words, if you had a Gmail account, and you were logged in, whenever you searched, Google would take into account what you’ve searched for, and more importantly, clicked on, to tailor the result of you next search, with the goal of helping you try to find what really interest you. You could easily see this in action by simply logging out of your Google account (or using a different browser where you are not logged in) and then doing the same search; the results would almost always be different. This is probably still somewhat true, but less so today, because in 2009, Google started remembering your past searches and clicks for everyone, even if you didn’t have a Google account or weren’t logged in. (How? Browser cookies. If you want to know lots more details about this, there’s a great blog post about how Google personalizes everyone’s search on searchengineland.com.)

What this means for SEO

Yes, it’s true that personalized search may filter out your site doesn’t fit the “likes” of the person searching. But it also means that people who have come to your site before, and other sites like it, will be more likely to be presented a result from your site the next time they search for something related to the topics covered on your site. That is, they have already “expressed” a preference to Google that they like your content, so your site may come up for them more often. The result: you may get increased engagement with the people who are interested in the topics or products you are writing about.

What you need to do

If people interested in your content (those who have clicked through to your site before) will see your site again in related future personalized searches, then your job is to keep creating new content so as to broaden the scope and depth of your content on those topics. Not to mention, you want those searchers to have something new to read when they come back to your site.

Filed under Optimizing your web presence. Tagged , ,
Comments Off

Getting Social Media Results with your Web Site Results

26 March 2011, 5:00 pm

Search engine optimization for social media is a new and evolving world, and figuring out how to bring it all together is still like finding your way in a forest (or New York City) without a compass.

Today, following my guest lecture for an NYU graduate class on SEO and Social Media, one of the students presented a great question: is it possible to get all the twitter accounts for all the top managers at a company to show up in the search results for that company? My on-the-spot answer was “I’m not sure”, but I said I’d find out more.

Your Brand on Twitter is YOU, Not Your Company

After I got home from my trip to the city, I started searching around, both for people who had possibly written on this topic, and doing some tests of my own using sites and people who I know to have pretty strong presences on Twitter.

I didn’t find any definitive writings on the subject, but some limited testing did yield some answers. It appears Google does not connect and group multiple twitter accounts for people at the same company or brand all on the same search results page. In fact, in my testing, I searched for a small company where the principal is very active in social media, especially twitter, yet in the search results for the company, her twitter account did not show up. This is despite the fact that even on her About page, she mentions her Twitter account. I got similar results for a prominent web media firm. Search for the brand name, and none of the contributing writer’s Twitter accounts show up, despite the fact that each of their bio pages has a link to the writer’s Twitter account.

However, if you search for a person with an active social media presence, for example the above-mentioned small business entrepreneur, you will probably see: their twitter account, their company web site, their Facebook profile, their LinkedIn profile, and any other social media results that may involve them.

So it would seem that Google does not connect people’s social media accounts to their company, despite how you may try to connect them with the proper keywords and links. At least, not today; who knows what Google will do with social media connections in the future.

How to Aggregate Your Company’s Social Media Content

Given that it appears you cannot control search results in this way, what’s the next best solution? I would recommend putting a Twitter feed on your company’s web site. There are a number of solutions out there using Javascript or platform plug-ins such as WordPress that will display all the tweets for a hash tag. Then whenever someone is tweeting about the company or brand, they just use that hash tag and the tweet will show up on the web site.

Of course, remember as I mention in my SEO presentation, depending on how you implement the Twitter feed, the content of that feed may or may not (often the latter) actually be indexed as part of the content of your page. But even if it is not, at least all your social media content will be visible to site visitors in one place.

What have you found? Have you figured out a way to aggregate all your company’s social media content in search results?

Filed under Optimizing your web presence. Tagged , , , ,
Comments Off

Presentation: SEO for Public Relations and Communications Pros

28 February 2011, 10:54 pm

Here’s the presentation I gave this evening for a class at NYU.

SEO for Public Relations and Communication Pros

In case you overlook it, the Mashable link on slide 20 will take you to an article on how to make press releases more SEO friendly. Something I thought might be of interest to the class.

I’ll also look for that Mashable article on StumbleUpon and post it when I find it.

Thanks for being a great class. Feel free to contact me directly, or post any follow-up questions you may have.

BTW– the WordPress theme I spoke about, being very flexible and customizable, is Atahualpa.

Filed under Optimizing your web presence. Tagged , , ,
Comments Off

New tools for SEO and social networking influence

27 February 2011, 2:56 pm

I’m excited about the opportunity to speak tomorrow night to a group of students at NYU and share what I’ve learned about search engine optimization (SEO). My good friend and client at The New York Times invited me to join her for the class she is teaching this semester.

In the process of putting together my presentation, I discovered some new, really cool tools that have come on the scene that allow you to quickly research keywords, domain names and other key parts of your brand and/or presence on the web and across the various social media sites, as well as some tools to see your “sphere of influence” in the world of social media. (Mine: pretty low score, but with the encouraging rating  of “up and coming”).

I’ll share more and post my presentation after I present tomorrow evening.

What interesting tools have you come across lately?

Filed under Optimizing your web presence. Tagged , , , ,
Comments Off

New Facebook Pages let you incorporate other web content

24 February 2011, 1:56 pm

If you have checked out the new release of Facebook Pages, you may have come across this new feature: the ability to create a “tab” (they now don’t look like tabs across the top, but rather display in the left-hand sidebar) and have the content in the center panel of that tab created from an external website. The trick is to create a Facebook App, and then choose the iframe option to link the app content to an external website. For those not familiar with the <iframe> HTML tag, it is used to create a window on a web page that contains the content of another web page (usually from an external website). In the past, iframes in Facebook pages/apps were illegal, but with the new feature release, they are not.

I recently got the opportunity to create a real-life example. We wanted to create a Facebook presence for The Great IT Security Challenge, a B2B site create to engage IT security professionals. By reworking the design and layout of the site home page, to fit the iFrame of the Facebook app tab, we were able to display the daily trivia question that is at the core of this challenge site. Registered members can even answer the daily question right from withing the Facebook page. See how it works: IT Security Challenge Facebook Page.

What applications can you can think of for this new Facebook Page feature?

Filed under Marketing With Facebook. Tagged 
Comments Off

Facebook givith, and Facebook takith away…

13 March 2010, 11:13 am

It was a small feature, but still…

This week, Facebook removed the “tag line” feature associated with Events. The tag line was a nice way to summarize in a short sentence or phrase the essence of the event. It also offered a nice parallel to the Subtitle field in an iTunes podcast. Hmmm… I’m wondering if Apple and Facebook are talking? The Subtitle was displayed in the last column with each episode listing, but in the redesign of iTunes 9, this seems to have been eliminated as well.

Ah well…

Filed under Marketing With Facebook. Tagged , , ,
2 Comments

Can you wear two hats as a Facebook Page admin?

23 February 2010, 9:40 am

Ever since I created the Why Shamanism Now Facebook page for my teacher and friend Christina Pratt, I’ve been challenged by the issue of both being the creator/admin for the page and also wanting to be an active fan of the page.

This morning I ran across a very relevant, related post on Michelle Paul’s blog. Michele’s post does an excellent job of explaining those actions which are page-related, and those which are personal-related.  In fact, the post answered or confirmed most of my questions about a Facebook admin role except one that is both technical and ethical: I manage the above-mentioned FB page with my both my “work” hat and my “play” hat on. That is, I created and manage this page to assist Christina, the one who actually owns the brand (radio show) that the Facebook page promotes. So that’s with  my “work” hat on. I’m also a fan of the radio show and would sometimes like to post things to the wall as “me”, with my “play” hat on. Here’s the problem: as a Facebook page admin, I can’t post as me, I can only post as “the page”. In other words, people think the post is coming from “the radio show” (i.e., Christina).

Continue reading ‘Can you wear two hats as a Facebook Page admin?’ »

Filed under Marketing With Facebook. Tagged , ,
2 Comments

Facebook Page Events: To Update Fans or not…

30 September 2009, 10:19 pm

Why Shamanism Now Facebook PageAs the creator and admin for Christina Pratt’s “Why Shamanism Now” Facebook Page, I’ve been creating events to highlight the title and brief description of each week’s episode. Since April, I have creating and then publishing each week’s event, which caused the event to display on both the Page’s home page wall and also in the events listing that appears on the lower left corner of the page.

But then I wondered if fans were seeing these updates on their own Facebook home page wall. (It’s not actually that easy for me to verify this because of being the owner and admin for the page, so the behavior is different for my Facebook home page.)

Facebook profile "update" notificationsSo instead of simply publishing each event, I decided to try using the Send Update feature. This causes an “update” notification to show up in each fan’s facebook account. Turns out these updates from a Facebook page are not really that prominantly displayed. Facebook fans of the page won’t notice these updates unless they regularly navigate to their Inbox page.

Looking around for suggestions and alternatives, I found that AllFacebook.com notes this issue and actually advises creating the events on a personal Facebook page, which then causes the message to go to your friends’ Inboxes where the event notice is more visible. For me, this solution doesn’t work, because my own Facebook friends are not the same universe of people who are fans of the radio show page. But I digress…

Tonight as I was updating the radio show podcast feed, I realized that the last two week’s show events were missing from the “Why Shamanism Now” Page’s wall. Seems that if you send updates about the event to people, Facebook automatically does NOT post the event to the page’s wall. Bummer!

I can’t find any info about this being the way Facebook pages and their events are supposed to work, but it sure seems like this is how it works. (The official documentation on Facebook Pages is pretty sparse.)

So, another detail learned about Facebook Pages. And now I have to figure out: do events sent as updates, or events published to the page’s wall generate more awareness of the event. When I find the answer, I’ll let you know…

Filed under Marketing With Facebook. Tagged , , , ,
2 Comments

You have to start somewhere…

20 September 2009, 4:00 pm

Having a real website for my business has been a long time coming.

Sure, I’ve made excuses—the old “Shoemaker’s Kids Always Go Barefoot” thing, meaning that while I’ve been doing work for my clients, I haven’t had time for myself—but they are that, just excuses, and sounding pretty hollow to me these days. Especially given the range of powerful, yet relatively easy to setup up tools, like WordPress (the basis of this site).

When I started my consulting business back in 2000, there were no other firms named  ”JG Marketing & PR” on the Internet, competing for the same name Google ranking. Not so anymore. All the more reason to put up a real site, with real content, that will get indexed and associate real traffic to my domain.

Part of my hesitation, and procrastination, was the old me saying “it needs to be perfect” before I go live. But over the past nine years, I’ve come to realize that the web is constantly changing and evolving. So you’ve got to start somewhere, and just keep making it better. Iterate.

So this is where I start. With an off-the-shelf template, to be sure. So right now maybe the look isn’t unique. But the search engines don’t care what it looks like, they care about what the content is. And that is where I will start building this site. Over time, the look will change and become more unique. First task will be to add my logo to the header. And then… we’ll see.

Filed under This site. Tagged ,
Comments Off