Social Media and SEO tools to increase your site traffic

Social Web sites that use common formats such as RSS can be easily arranged and connected to spread your message far and wide on the Internet. This post covers some different Social Media tools and “use-patterns” for self-promotion. It is worth noting that most of the tools mentioned here are “best of breed.” There are many other tools that can be used for these purposes. There are also many other ways in which you can use these tools, but the most valuable patterns are discussed here.

Using Social Media and Back Links To Promote A Blog

The promoter pattern is for someone who wants to build back links to themselves by spreading their content as far and wide as possible. These days, one of the first suggestions site owners hear is to install WordPress blog and start blogging. The reason for this is that WordPress is highly SEO optimized and uses things like ping servers to announce to search engines what you have written. WordPress also provides for trackbacks to other blogs, to make sure that all the content that you create is as linked together and discoverable as possible.

To really get your message out there, you have to go and tell the world about yourself. The best way to do that is to use a service like FriendFeed or Facebook to subscribe to the RSS feed that your blog creates and of course build your own back links to conversational hubs like Twitter, Delicious and StumbleUpon to let the world know what you have been writing about.

Monitoring a brand or topic on social sites

The next pattern is a conversationalist pattern. This is for brand managers or anyone with a product or site that wants to know what is being said about their topic area on conversational hubs on the Internet. Three sites hot these days are Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter. This is where early adopters are likely discussing your brand, and where you can participate in the conversation. Other tools like Google Alerts are useful for monitoring comments about your product or your topical keywords in order to address your customers (or readers) needs.

Spread your message by replicating it on multiple services.

In actuality, you should probably implement all of the patterns describe here. But, if you are more concerned about broadcasting messages out to followers on social networks, Ping.fm is an excellent service for re-posting short messages from a central website. There is also an instant messenger connection, so you can very quickly publish to a wide number of services merely by sending an instant message.

For example, with Ping.fm, you can add Ping.fm as an instant messenger buddy and anytime there is something new to announce about your product or service, you send it via instant messenger to Ping.fm, which then re-posts it on Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and many other services as a status update or as a micro blog post. This gives you tons of leverage and reach, if you can imagine just posting a very short message and having it re-posted on all these services, without you having to set up any feeds, you just set up your account details with Ping.fm.

Staying relevant by recommending good content

The last hack is gives a publisher tremendous leverage. By connecting your Google Reader “Shared Items” feed to FriendFeed (or a service like TwitterFeed) you can automatically publish new content to your Twitter followers simply by clicking a single “share” button in Google Reader. Given that there is even an iPhone version of Google Reader, this means you can Tweet from the beach by just selecting content (not actually writing anything). This is an important and easy way to establish yourself as a trusted information source with existing and potential customers. Obviously, you want to “recommend” selectively so as to not overload your social network, but the key here is to be a relevant input to your prospect’s information stream.

If you have other Social Media hacks, or favorite configurations, please post them in the comments! The images in this post are also available as a SlideShare Presentation.

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One way to help increase your number of Twitter followers is to make your profile look great.

1. Pick a good background image from iStockPhoto or DeviantArt

• make sure you’re legal (pay for the image, or check the rights)
• pick something that makes for a nice background (not foreground)
• make sure the interesting part of the image is in the upper left (see next point)
• pick an image that fades to a solid color on the bottom and right edges

2. Customize your image. I like to use Skitch and Pixelmator for this.

• you may need to stretch your image so that it works as a background, or fade the edges to a solid color.
• you can text on their background image (a company logo or “about me” blurb)

3. Upload your image and choose background colors to match the solid color at the right and bottom of the image. This will give the appearance that your image goes on forever.

Once you’ve customized your profile, post a comment below to get feedback from others.

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Google and Facebook both launched services today and you may be faced with a decision about which to use. Both offer very similar ways to allow users to log in to your Web site with either their Facebook or Google account. Both allow you to make your Web site more social (potentially more viral), and give you way more information about your visitors. I’ll take you on a quick walk through in this short video.

Both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect add social features to your website. Google Friend Connect is now running on this blog. You can do much deeper integrations, but this will give you the flavor of it. So, effectively I can sign in using my Google credentials and then invite friends, precipitate in comments, all using my Google account.

Check out Sociable.es to see the Facebook implementation running on a WordPress blog (a more official Wordpress Plug-in is rumored to be coming soon). The Sociable.es widget appears very similar to the Google widget, and again you can actually do much more integration than what’s demonstrated there. Basically, the widget records who has visited based on an opt-in login. One feature of the Sociable.es implementation that you might find this entertaining is the very recognizable “invite your friends” page. So now, your visitors can invite their friends to your site. This may make you cringe or make you smile.

The only difference between the two: Google is a little bit more advanced in that you can drag and drop some scripts into your site and get more functionality more quickly, but it’s a little bit buggier, from what I’ve read. “Facebook Connect” is primarily just a re-branding of “Facebook App”, capabilities that have been around for a long. Also, they’ve smoothed out the sign-in process. However, you could have faked this using all the Facebook APIs that have been around for the last year and a half or so.

Why would you implement either of these? First of all, it makes it easier for your users to sign in. Whichever service you use, it’s going to give you a lot of user profile data without them ever having entered it on your site. Users just approved that your site has access to their data. Undoubtedly, there will be Web analytics tools shortly to let you track exactly who visits your site, how often, with details of their gender, age, and nationality.

Also, implementing Facebook or Friend Connect potentially makes your site more viral due to the invite and news feed features. Rather than a “Share This” button, you can have an invite your friends button that could share your product or re-post or anything on your website to a social network news feed. Additionally, there will be lots of developer tools that come out that allow you to supplement your existing website with social features like questions, comments, ratings, with pre-built code either from Facebook, Google or third-party developers.

These are exciting services for users and site owners because they allow for non-anonymous Web surfing. From Google and Facebook’s perspective, the more sites that implement these services, the more user identities they will own accross the internet. It is something that Yahoo’s MyBlogLog and Microsoft’s Passport have tried before, but potential with the new services is greater because they are easier to implement, and give access to more data.

Related links:

• Google Friend Connect
• Facebook Connect
• Google Friend Connect Example Site
• Facebook Connect example Site

Other comments and questions

• Will Google’s friends list tie in with other OpenSocial implementers (MySpace and LinkedIn)?
• There is no reason why you can’t implement both on your Web site.

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The short answer is: not yet, but you need to play with it anyway. Google Search Wiki is a huge new feature from Google. It lets you re-rank the results you get from a Google Search to your own liking. These changes are not normally visible to other users (yet) but they can click a link “See all notes for this SearchWiki” at the bottom of each Google search page to see all re-rankings for that particular search.

Long term this has huge ramifications as it makes Google search results more socially malleable. You should actively rank your sites to the top for all the search terms you care about now so that as more people discover this feature, they will see your sites and comments for their searches. You should see very small short-term gains in traffic if you hit major keyword searches.

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