Tag Archives: Link Building

Getting Started with Social Media for Your Business

When you are getting started with social media, trying to get all of these different tools set up for your online business, it can be a little overwhelming.  There are numerous online tools available, with new ones coming out every week.

What I want to focus on are the major tools, the ones that dominate the their markets and are considered authority sites.  By adding quality content within these platforms, you will slowly build up a following and this will also lead to stronger and higher rankings in the search engines.

It is best to set up one of the social media sites from start to finish and then move onto the next one.  You want to make sure that you have set everything up correctly and by focusing on a single site, you do not get confused with what you may be working on for another social media site.

On of the most important reasons for setting these sites up one at a time is for traffic flow.  When you know that you have one site set up properly, then you will not have to go back and fix problems that interfere with the next social media site you are setting up.

Since I have covered writing content for your sites in other posts, I will only say that it is very important that you make sure that whatever you write is very clear, compelling and will solve your visitors problem, or answer there question. Good quality content can help your website and social media pages move higher in the search engines as well as build a strong loyal following for your product or service.

Starting your Online Business with a Blog

If you do not have a website or a blog, you will want a home base. Somewhere to send your social media visitors to. A blog, or a website is the best place.  You can add as much content as you want, in a way that you are comfortable with. You can say whatever you want, in any way that you want to express yourself.  Your blog is your online personality.

When you are first starting out, it is best to keep things simple.  Just use the templates that come with whatever blogging platform that you choose to go with.  Down the road, when you want to rebuild your blog, it is very easy to update and change your blog sites appearance.

The beauty of a blog is that the content is separate from the template that creates the look of the blog.  You can change the template and the appearance of your blog as often as you want and your content will automatically be added to the new site.

You can upload new content to your blog and send it to your social media followers through your different social media sites.  Anyone following your posts and updates, or following the people that follow you, can click on the link and they will be able to read the full post.

Any one of these is a great place to start. My preference is for WordPress because with the right hosting, you own and control, your own domain.  This means that you have your own email servers, you can easily set up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics in the background. You have far greater control over how your site is used and managed.

You can have a presence on all of these different blogging sites, just make sure that the content that you put on each of these sites is very different from what is on the other sites.  You can use each of the different blogging platforms for different reasons if you want to.

Personally, I would just stick to one blog platform and focus on integrating it with my social media sites. It can get a little confusing trying to keep track of connecting just one blog with the different social media sites. Adding in another two, or three, blogs to this could get a little overwhelming.

Blogger

Blogger / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) is owned by Google.  It is their online blog site, that is easily connected to their online social media platform, Google+.  Google makes it very easy to set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools in Blogger. The set up time is minimal, you can be up and running, posting your first messages to the online world in about 15 minutes. Blogger is a good platform because of the tie in to Google+.  By updating Blogger, you can also post the update to Google+ and Google+ is still very relevant as a social media platform.

Tumblr

Tumblr /  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr is now owned by Yahoo. Tumblr is what is known as a micro blog, or short form (post) style of blog. It incorporates a Twitter feed, so whenever you post something to your Tumblr page an update will be sent out to your Twitter feed. Tumblr puts more emphasis on media such as images or videos. A lot of the users like it because they prefer the style of short, frequent posts. If you do not have a lot of time to devote to a blog, but you want an “all in one” solution, this is a good site to use.

WordPress – the version that you host on your servers

There are actually two versions of WordPress.  One version is hosted on the servers that you get when you sign up for domain hosting.  This is a free version of the WordPress software you download through your cPanel. After you set a few things up you can start adding your content.

This version of WordPress allows you to control every aspect of your online presence. You have your own email through your own servers. You can change the look and feel of your site by simply uploading a new template, or by making changes to your existing template. Your cost for this
https://wordpress.org / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress

WordPress.org – the version that is hosted by WordPress

The second version version of WordPress is also free, but it hosted on the WordPress.org servers.  This is easier to set up than the downloadable version of WordPress, but it is limited in what it can do.  You cannot upload your own templates, you have to work with the templates that WordPress gives you. You can make changes to the templates, but these are pretty basic changes compared to what you can do with the downloadable version of WordPress that you host on your own domain.

The templates that WordPress.org does give you are very good and most people are happy with the look and the feel of them. The good news is that if you ever outgrow your WordPress.org site, you can back it up and move it to your own hosted version of WordPress and install it on your own servers. WordPress has made this a lot easier to do than it used to be.
http://wordpress.com / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress.com

SquareSpace

SquareSpace / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squarespace I do not know much about SquareSpace. A friend of mine who does a lot of web design and SEO work told me about this blog site. This is a commercial blogging platform that you have to pay per month to use. They charge $10, $20 and $30 per month for the Personal, Professional, or Business plan. He said that it is a very good platform with a lot of features built into it.

Social Media Sites

Once you have your website, or blog set up you will need to let people know about your business. While search engine traffic is important, social media traffic has become even more important. Search engines have been ranking websites by how much traffic, links and likes they get from social media sources. The more you are talked about on social media sites, the better your rankings.

This makes a huge amount of sense. Social media signals are very hard to fake. If people like your site, they share it. If they don’t like your sit, they will not share it. This gives the search engines simple and clean numbers and links to work with. In the old days, black hat SEO could easily fool the search engines. Today the social media signals are created by real people sharing your information. Real people equal real results and real traffic.

Start with whichever social media account you feel that you have the most interest in, or the one that you think will be the easiest to set up. When that one is finished, pick another, then another.  You will have all of these accounts set up very quickly if you do it this way. By the time you get to the harder projects, you will be a master at setting these up and knowing what has to go where.

FaceBook

FaceBook / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook is the biggest social media site on the internet in terms of active users. Twitter is close and so is YouTube. Although YouTube is very important to your web presence, I am not sure I would call it a true social media site. When you set up your FaceBook page, you want to also send notifications of new blog posts from your blog site (or sites) to FaceBook. It is very important to get the content onto FaceBook and the links back to your blog site. As more people see your posts and FaceBook updates, they will like them and send them to other friends, which will send a lot of links and traffic back to your blog site. These links will help to increase your search engine rankings and bring in additional traffic.

 Google+

It is very important to set up a Google+ account / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B By sharing your blog posts through Google+ you could get your content indexed more quickly. Like FaceBook, Google+ has a feature that allows users to “like” (or “Plus”) and “share” your content.  This gives you some indication of how well received your posts are. If your content is also on Google+, you can also set up alerts to track what people are saying about you and your business. By looking at the feedback, you might get an idea of what your readers are looking for and you might be able to head off any problems before they become serious.

 Twitter

Twitter / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter is one of the first social media sites that you want to set up. Once you have Twitter set up, you want to link your social media sites to your Twitter account so that whenever you publish a new blog post, add a Facebook update, add content to Blogger or Google+, it will also be sent out to your Twitter feed.

You will want to add your Twitter feed to the home page of your blog site. This is fairly easy to do in WordPress with either a plugin, or by manually adding the code for the feed. You want to add Twitter contacts that have similar interests to what you are posting on your blog. Their Twitter posts could be added to the Home page of your blog so that the search engines see that you are always adding new content to your site.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkedin This is more of a business networking website. If you have any special skills, or knowledge, then this would be a good idea to join. Once your SEO skills and social media traffic building skills are proving to bring in traffic, LinkedIn would be a good idea to join under the SEO category, and possibly the web design category. You could post SEO articles on your website and maybe get some feedback from your LinkedIn contacts.

 Pinterest

Pinterest / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest Pinterest is sort of an online bulletin board of pictures, thoughts and ideas. You can put together a “pinboard” collection of ideas that you may want to pursue, a inboard of goals, or a inboard of pictures that showcases your business.

You can link Pinterest to your FaceBook and Twitter accounts, so anything that you put up on Pinterest will show up on your FaceBook page and Twitter feed. If you have Twitter and FaceBook set up to display your updates and tweets on your blogs’ home page, then those pictures will show up on your home page. This will show up in the search engines as new content for your website, which the search engines want to see on a regular basis.

YouTube

YouTube / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube YouTube is a video sharing website, so it might not fit into the normal definition of social media. Most of the uploaded content is not user generated, it is existing content that gets re-shared (re-gifted?). Even so, it is actually very important to set up a YouTube account.

I would probably leave this one until last, just because of the amount of work involved in adding your own content. You can add other people’s content to your account and then link to that from your YouTube Account to a post on your blog. The linked video could be used to add support to the post that you have written. This will help give you a bit of a boost with your search engine rankings because of YouTubes huge domain authority.

It would be even better to add your own videos to your YouTube account. These could be as simple as doing a voice over while you show slides for the video. If you are not camera shy, then you could be seen doing a hands on demonstration, or interviewing someone.

By putting your own videos online, they could be picked up by others and added to their accounts, or they could be used on their websites. If they get used on other people’s websites, then the code links them to your YouTube account and back to your own website. This will boost your domain’s authority and give your search rankings another boost.

Using HootSuite to Manage Everything

HootSuite / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootsuite  is a very interesting company, based up here in very beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. HootSuite is a subscription based tool, but it is worth the investment. What HootSuite does is manages all of your social media and even your blog posts. You upload your content, tell HootSuite what to publish and where to publish it and then tell it when you want it published. It will allow you to set up a schedule to post your content when you need it posted. If you need weekly blog posts, that also need to be uploaded to your FaceBook page and then tweeted to your followers, HootSuite will do it.

This is more of a power users tool. If you run multiple websites with connected social media and an active Twitter feed, then this will cut down your workload considerably. Everything you need to manage the content flow for all of your sites will be in one place.

Domain Authority and Link Building

Domain Authority is an estimate of how strongly rated your domain is estimated to be. It is based on the strength of the other domains that are linking to your website. If no domains are linking to your website, your domain authority will be very low. If several websites with very high domain authority have linked to your website, then your domain authority will be strong. The higher your domain authority, the better your Google and Bing rankings.

This is why YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, University and other high traffic resource websites dominate the Google search results. They all have domain authority in the 90s. If you can get links from those sites, and back link to those sites, that domain authority gets passed to your website and it will climb in the rankings.

It is very important to link back to an internal page of a high domain authority site that is linking to your domain, not their home page. Make sure that the page that you are linking to matches the content of the page that you are linking from.  You also want to try to avoid linking directly back to the page that the site is linking to you from. It is not a huge problem if you do this occasionally.

If numerous pages on your website link back to the same pages within the various domains that link to your website, that will get Googles’ attention as an unnatural linking profile and earn you a penalty, sometimes a very severe penalty if you have done this too much.  If you keep linking to the home pages of the various domains, it will also look like an unnatural linking profile and you will wind up with a penalty instead of bonus traffic.

I know that I have said this already, but this is critical; to avoid getting a penalty, link back to different internal pages on the other domains, that have similar content to the page you are linking from.  This will show Google and Bing that you have put a lot of thought into your content and that you are trying to deliver a great experience for your readers.

If you are not aware of this yet, whenever you link to an outside website – always make sure that the link opens in a new browser window.  That way when the reader closes the new window, your site is still open in the background.  You may have people continue reading your website and it will also show that people have spent a lot of time on your website even though they were reading something in a new window.

There are exceptions to how you link to pages on some domains:

Passing on YouTube domain authority;

If you have your own YouTube page and you are placing your YouTube videos on your website from this page, you should be OK. I would suggest that you also link to other YouTube videos from other, relevant YouTube pages just to increase the diversity of links.  If you write a new page on a topic, find a YouTube video that relates to that topic and use the YouTube embed link to embed that video on your website as part of your article.

Passing on FaceBook domain authority;

If you have a Facebook page, you will be posting your content updates on your Facebook page and linking back to your website. Everyone does this and it does give you a slight boost. What you also want to do is find the Facebook pages that are similar your website and if they have good, relevant content, write a new article on your domain and use link it to their Facebook page, or the post that they wrote.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
This is a free tool, but it is limited in how much information you can see. It only lists the Domain Authority for the top 5 websites that are linking to your website. It is still useful though. You can scroll down the list and look at all the sites that have linked to your site and you may spot some sites that you recognize. These are the sites that you will want to link back to.

Look for .org websites and then put the domain into the Site Explorer and check their domain authority. If it is legitimate .org website, it will have a domain authority greater than 50. The higher the better. .gov websites are great, so are recognized domain names, but check them in the site explorer first to make sure they are real sites and not someone who set up a copycat domain using a name variation. .org websites can be bought by anyone, so make sure you check them. You can just as easily drop your domain authority by lining to bad websites. Google has a neat penalty waiting for you for this whenever they run the Penguin algorithm.

The best way to back link to a high domain authority website that has linked to your website is to add a link back to their website through new content. You could find a page on their domain that is relevant to the content on your domain and write 1000 to 1500 about the relevancy and then link to that internal page in their domain within your new content.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
This explains how Domain Authority is calculated. Because Domain Authority is hard to fake, it is becoming a very valuable indicator of how well your site is viewed by other sites. If a lot of sites that rank high for Domain Authority are linking to your website, it probably means that your site is being viewed as a high quality site by other high quality sites.

Two sites that you want to try to get into. These both have very high domain authority and all the sites are reviewed by people, so Google and Bing put a lot of credibility on the domains that are listed in these directories.

http://www.dmoz.org
DMOZ is also known as Open Directory. It is made up of websites that are reviewed by people, so everything in this directory is real and legitimate.  It can take sometime before your site shows up in the directory, because the people reviewing the sites are all volunteers and they each may have numerous categories to oversee.

http://dir.yahoo.com
Yahoo Directory is similar to DMOZ in that a person reviews your domain and if they feel that it has good content and it is relevant to that category, they will include it in their directory. The Yahoo directory results not the same as Yahoo search results.  Yahoo search results will not show up in the Yahoo Directory, but Yahoo Directory results will show up in Yahoo Search results.  US users have to pay annually for inclusion in the Yahoo index. Canadian and foreign users did not have to pay for inclusion, but this may have also changed.

Google Places a lot of weight on being in the Yahoo Directory.  It used to place a lot of weight on being in the Open Directory, but over the years Open Directory has become less relevant, but still very important.  It is still a very good idea to try and get your site into Open Directory and Google will still place a lot of weight on this, because your site was reviewed by a human editor, so they know that it is a real, and legitimate, website.  This will give your domain ranking a boost, even if you cannot get into the Yahoo Directory.