Dance With Strangers

Part I on SEO basics and how to get started.

Part II on alt tags, header tags and Flash optimization.

In Part III of our week long look at SEO and social marketing we are actually going to do a lot more on the edge of social marketing and look at some of the networks and tools that are out there that can really help your SEO, while also helping you engage more interactively with your community. This post assumes you read Part I and Part II and you are already started with hyperlinking your key phrases and optimizing your site, at least just a wee little bit.

1) Video is King

We are all using more and more video in our marketing efforts because it’s fun, expressive and impactful. One element of using video is hosting so that you can embed within your site/blog. If you are like me you’ve tried them all; YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv and more. Over the past few months I used each of these services, mainly to find one that had the best playback quality and viewer features. Going through this practice however I also found a major SEO difference with these video hosting sites. What to look for:

• Can you embed links in your description? This is an obvious plus and Blip.tv has become my go-to video site primarily because of this resource. Now look carefully because on Blip, without a Pro account, it seems as if you can’t embed links, but go ahead and use your <a href> tags within your video description and watch the links show up!
• Do you love Google? Because if you do, or even if you are just afraid of them, be sure to put your videos on YouTube as well. I’m not saying Google ranks YouTube videos higher because they own the site, I’m just saying it’s a good idea to cover all your bases. Plus it is still the most visited video site, so it really can not hurt.
• Can you organize? It’s great to put a bunch of videos up, but it is even better when you can create a “TV Station” or one stop shop for your videos. YouTube and Blip are my favorite for this, especially the personalization you can do on your YouTube page. Take a look at our page on Blip.tv:

• Can you mesh with other media? I’m really excited to use Flickr a bit more to post our videos, just looked into that this week on our BreakingPoint Flickr Page. Obviously the nice thing about this is we can incorporate two different mediums for folks, the bad thing is they only accept 90 second videos at this point. Watch for this site and others to use in the future.

2) Look to your Friend…Feed

A few months ago I wrote about self-sustaining SEO through the use of FriendFeed.

The BreakingPoint FriendFeed group we created just a few months ago was the number one organic result on Google and our blog was number two. What is so amazing about these results is the fact that we were not optimizing those two pages for this term, rather we had been focussing on a different variation, “network equipment testing” which is optimized for our home page.

The reason FriendFeed is the number one result is fairly simple and speaks to the complexity and sophistication of Google (yeah, I’m pandering to Google, so what?):

1. The URL has the keywords;
2. The page has several additional mentions of the keyword…but not too much;
3. The page is being constantly refreshed with content since it is coming in from our blog, Twitter feed, Flickr, etc;

Self-Sustained SEO! As long as FriendFeed is around and we are putting up relevant content to “network equipment testing” this will be a terrific way for our company to be found.

3) Scribd and SlideShare Can Help Too

You have a ton of content; white papers, data sheets, news releases and more. It is a shame to only have that content on your website, you need to share it with more people…and reap some SEO rewards! The two sites I would really encourage you to visit is Scribd and SlideShare and start uploading your content. SlideShare is certainly not just for slides, you can put up almost any document, including YouTube videos, and they have a really slick app so that people can access this content from your LinkedIn page. But one of the features I like the best about SlideShare is the ability to create personalized URLs for your content, for example this white paper we put up on reducing time-to-test, a huge SEO tool.

Scribd is still a bit new to me, but I really like how I can create a central repository for my content, similar to our video page on Blip. They also have personalized URLs and they actually tell you on the side of your documents the last time the search engine bots went through to index the page!! Very cool.

In Part IV I’m going to put on my old school PR hat and talk news release SEO, wire services, PitchEngine and more.