I told myself I wouldn’t share this secret with anyone until I tried it out myself. Well, over 2 years since conception I have a full time job – which is good news – however, it means that I haven’t optimized my own content. Oh well.

This my seem formulaic, but with social media optimization, formulaic is what we want, despite how much that might piss off your traditional social media enthusiast who thinks there should be no rules.

Here goes:  ... Read This »

• First.  let’s say you want to optimize your website to get more StumbleUpon stumbles. You would make sure that you have content geared toward the StumbleUpon demographic: something interesting, different, intelligent, creative, etc.

Facebook aims to learn as much about it’s individual users as possible in order to display contextually relevant, paid advertising to them. What does your profile say about you, personally? And, which of that information is Facebook “mining” to pin down precisely who you are, and what products and services you might be interested in?

Let’s look at the user inputs on Facebook.

First, it’s a social network, so they’ve got your connections mapped out. They know who you know, and they know who they know, and how they’re connected. They know how often you talk to certain members, and can make assumptions as to how close you are, or would like to be. They know who’s pictures you look at. But what does Facebook do with these insights? Other than suggesting “virtual gifts” on your pal’s birthday, I don’t think Facebook does much with the data that establishes “connectedness”, other than to provide that data to 3rd parties for a fee; background check services, I would imagine.  ... Read This »

Social media enthusiasts still haven’t agreed on a definition for “social media optimization,” but if we are to call it “optimization,” there must be some basic science behind social website design.

The vast majority websites are designed as billboards out in cyberspace with which the user has almost no interaction, other than to view, comprehend the site, and possibly buy something or to be directed to buy something somewhere else. The most common entrance to these websites is through a search engine like Google.

Social media optimization is concerned with getting the most out of your visitors by harnessing their influence. Rather than simply reading your content, alternative options for your visitor could be to:  ... Read This »

1. Subscribe to your content via email newsletter or RSS
2. Link out to your website from one of their websites (provided that your visitor happens to be a webmaster or blogger)

It has been observed among the SEO community that content farms such as eHow, HowStuffWorks, Mahalo and Wikipedia receive a disproportionate and undeserved share of top rankings for competitive search terms. But, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, Google must be ranking these sites well for a good reason.

Here is the conspiracy:

Certain words or phrases imply a corresponding search intent, beyond relevance and quality. If I were to search “buy a car,” I wouldn’t expect Google to return news, how-to guides, images, videos, or maps – these do not match the consumer-oriented intent of my search. I want to buy a fricking car!

Take this search for example: “Banner Ads”

 ... Read This »

Matt Cutts, the head of “web spam” at Google, says that you should focus on creating great content, and that people will naturally link to your website over time, which will eventually help your search engine rankings. That’s nice, and I would like to believe him, but there is a mountain of data compiled by SEO experts that suggest otherwise. Off-page SEO – the solicited acquisition of links pointing back to your website – still works and is big business. There are ways to not only increase your link-ability, but to increase your online influence by leveraging major social networks.  ... Read This »

Consider a random, non-specific piece of content. It could be a blog post, an article, a picture, video, song or any other piece of digital information you can fathom. The content of the content is not important for what I am about to discuss. This post is concerned with why people share links more on a social network like Twitter than they do on a network like Facebook.

“Facebook is for friends,” is what you’re probably thinking. Good. Facebook is for friends, and you are interested in social media optimization. Your friends aren’t. They are your friends, probably in spite of your interest in things like social media optimization, and since they aren’t interested in this very specific topic, you may not feel compelled to share something so arbitrary to them.  ... Read This »

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has made some bold predictions that the internet will undergo radical transformation over the next five years. He was right about the marketing value search engines would have and as the dominant online player, Google’s decisions directly affect the future of the internet, but Google’s success may have given Schmidt slightly less than prophetic delusions.

His prediction that mobile web usage – internet use via web-capable cell phones – will surpass internet use via desktop is based upon some misplaced presumptions:  ... Read This »

1. Cell phones are fully capable of displaying the internet.
2. Proper cell phone design can provide robust navigation and adequately sized keyboards.
3. Increase in cell phone quality equates to increase in utility.