Adding Social Bookmarking Icons to Your Site

With the rise of social search, it's important for your website to offer the possibility of sharing its content with the users who visit your site. While it's important to remember that the majority of social sites have a nofollow attribute attached to outbound links, and thereofre pass no link juice, it's still remains a mention of your business, and can drive traffic. There is also some belief that despite not affecting rankings through any Page Rank that could pass from these kind of links, there may be something in Google's algorithm which looks at social mentions, citiations - similar to local search.



There is also the added reason that Google has been adding Tweets into it's search results for a couple of months now, and Yahoo! recently announced a deal with Twitter to do the same - meaning it's all the more important for people to be able to share your great content across the web. So how?

Well, the easiest way to add social buttons to your site is through addthis. The clever guys over at addthis have developed a series of customisable buttons for you to download and add to your blog or website. They can even combine the buttons with analytics to show how and through which mediums your work is shared or passed along. All for free! Good eh?

Are you puzzled about your social media strategy and presence online? Contact me for a chat and we can work towards a strategy together. I also offer affordable website optimisation or SEO Training in Barcelona.

A Couple of New Twitter Tools.

Keeping up with all things social is difficult. Many small businesses are torn between allocating budget and time between traditional marketing methods, SEO and Social Media. Social Media is a much larger and longer strategy than traditional SEO mentods, or conversion optimisation and needs specific goals to warrant the time and effort spent. This is again difficult to measure - how can you set goals for twitter, for example? Number of followers? brand mentions? it all depends, and I still maintain that time can be better spent for the majority of small businesses on other seo strategies to drive more traffic or increase conversions on the traffic you already have. By all means, claim all your brand names as soon as you can, and maintain a small presence so accounts don't get deleted, but if you're struggling on man power for a B2C (business to customer) venture, don't go overboard.



There are a couple of great tools to make things that little bit easier for you to try and keep up with things if social media is new to you. Twitter itself has an internal search, but there are a couple of other supplemental tools which can help.

Firstly, in terms of reputation managment, and finding out when you, your name, or your product and website are mentioned, you can use TweetBeep. This is a handy way of tracking your online presence and will become a more important tool as your social strategy continues along the way. Sign up as you start, and then wait until things get moving before you'll see important data. Kind of like google alerts, but for twitter.



For trending topics, try Twitturly. If you want to stay on top of what's being re-tweeted the most, or fing out particular notions in your niche, then try this service as well as twitter search. The main difference is that twitter search will give you a real-time vertical list of the things you seacrh for, and twitturly gives you trending topics with amount of retweets, etc. It's very handy for stripping down bit.ly urls, for example (so you can see the destination url) and also if you type your own username in there, it will give you a drilldown of your tweets, who has retweeted, who clicked through to the link, etc. handy.

Are you struggling to cope with the idea of a social strategy? for affordable SEO in Barcelona contact me for more details. Also, if you're interested in SEO Training in Barcelona, I can offer in house sessions and workshops.

Real Time Search

As I've mentioned before, the Engines are struggling to cope with the impact of real time search as seen on social sites such as Twitter. I think if you haven't claimed your social media name already, you're wasting time. At least your brand name or company name - even if you're unsure of what to do with it just yet.

We've seen steps recently that Google seems to be adding Twitter information (profiles, not Tweets) of fairly high profile users in the SERPs - where a normal search for your own name might throw up a Linkedin page, Ashton K's Twitter profile is showing.

Bing has also attempted to add real time search into their results, but it's a bit sketchy at best. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

Looking for better results from your website? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a no obligation chat/review of your site. I also offer Link Building Services in Barcelona to boost your rankings in the SERPs.

Claiming Your Social Media Presence

Social Media is becoming more and more important as a current e-marketing strategy. More and more people are turning to social media for reviews, comments, and up to the second information regarding products and options for purchases. So it's important for your company to start creating that social media presence in those websites that might work. Have you created a Facebook page? Already Twittering? Got your photos on flickr?



There are literally hundreds of social media sites to choose from and depending on your website's audience, some may work better than others. So what happens when you go to one of these websites and your domain name has already been taken? This can happen, and is definitely something that can throw a spanner in the works with regards your branding. Sites such as Twitter are fairly good at helping reclaim a name if they think you deserve it, but it's a good idea to claim your name amongst as many sites as you can, even just to cover all possible options.

Knowem is a site which takes care of a lot of the legwork for you. The site checks your desired user name on 120 social media sites, and also offers a paid service to register those names for you (if you don't have the time). It's a fairly quick process for them to check all the sites (considering the time you would take on your own) and is also a great place to check out some new sites that maybe you didn't know before.

Interested in creating your social media presence online? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details. Or if you prefer to find out more about other link building techniques, I also offer SEO Training on a one to one basis or in groups.

Social Media for Search

Traditional search has changed dramatically over the last few years, and it looks to be on the brink of (or it's already happening) another shift, a quite important one.

After the introduction of Google's Universal Search SEOs needed to prepare for visibility in what was essentially going to become a Vertical Search for a product. However, it's well known that search results can be manipulated, and despite Google doing it's utmost to deliver the best results, it can still fall short - and that's because it's SERPs are dependent on Mathematical algorithms, not people (obviously that would be impossible!).


So here's where the shift is going. The rise of Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter mean that as long as you have a certain community established within those websites, you can get your answers a lot quicker. Let me give you an example. Let's say your printer breaks down on you. So you send a quick tweet on Twitter - which updates your facebook page - about how your printer just broke and you're on the lookout for a new one. No more than 90 Euros.



Within a couple of hours, you might have some replies from friends or colleagues, or hell, even PC City if they're SEOs are savvy enough to use things like backtweet. These can range from "wow, don't get an Epson" to "I'm sure XX store has got a special on this week" to "I'm selling mine, only 2 weeks old, cos I got it free with my new laptop" etc. etc.

Now if you compare that with a normal SERP, you would likely get a couple of review sites, some branded pages like HP, Epson, etc. but nothing "REAL TIME". It is this freshness of having real people to talk to which can make us think twice about rushing straight to Google, Yahoo! or MSN for something we need. User Generated Content (or UGC) is going to become huge and Content is always King.

Like what you're reading? Please feel free to leave a comment or if you have anything specific to share about your social search, I'd love to hear from you.

For more information about social search, contact me at Barcelona SEO or if you'd like some SEO Training in Barcelona I can come into your office or workplace and teach you.

Social Media Basics

The majority of you will already be familiar with many of the social media websites out there. Almost everyone is now a member of Facebook, or if you're a professional, LinkedIn, but these are more than likely on a personal social basis. So what about for business?

Well, in my opinion, it's becoming more and more important to create a social media presence online, and it's only going to get bigger in 2009. It's also very important to not become spammy. Social media can be very time consuming, so for beginners, it's often better to concentrate on just a few sites, rather than trying to cover all the bases and signing up for them all. Create a Facebook page for your business/website and choose another.

It's important to point out, that almost all of the social media sites have the nofollow attribute attached to the links, so in terms of building your PageRank, this will not do much good (don't worry too much about PageRank) - it's rather an organic way of getting people to visit your website.

One of the best ways to gain popularity or followers on sites such as Twitter or in your Facebook page is to get in contact with your existing customers or if you have a mailing list, send a mail asking your clients to join your group or become a fan/follower. Then post interesting things on your pages, and always try and reply to anyone who replies as quickly as possible. One way is to perhaps say something that will strike up a lot of attention - try challenging a widely held belief (as long as you can back it up) or announcing some free giveaway on your site or something like that. Top 10 lists are also a good hook, so think about your market and make up a couple of top 10 lists. You can also set up sites like Twitter to co-incide with your new blog posts if you have a blog for example.

For more information about Social Media and other SEO strategies in Barcelona please contact me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about your site and