Summary: Getting the Most SEO Benefit Out of Social Media with Kevin Mullett (@kmullett) #seochat

Guest: @kmullett. He leads the Cirrus ABS vertical market product development efforts and social media programs. @kmullett is a proven & experienced web dev, marketer, and UI designer with over 12 yrs experience in website & internet marketing. He has many professional accommodations for his work including an ADDY award for interactive design excellence.

What are some ways to get the best links from social media?

Pay atten to what ranks, where competitors are getting backlinks that are beating you, & avoid bad neighborhoods, long term. Of course anything with do follow and allows for KWP in anchort text is cool too. Example buzzfeed or google profiles. KWP – the keywords / keyword phrase clusters we have agreed to go after for the client.

@kristy: Other than profile links what other tactics do you see working for link building in social?
@kmullett: Any link shared that ends up on status pages has the potential to be crawled back to the page/site.

@supernaut76: Aside from tumblr what else do you use to get your links crawled quicker?
@kmullett: There are many. Favs like buzzfeed or friendfeed.
@dan_patterson: Feeds are great for increasing your exposure as well.

How can you use social media to maximize the reach of your content?

Two audiences you reach with social media, the living kind and the bot / crawler kind. Both bring value. The search engines are either mining social sites or paying for access. They do so for a reason. Huge treasure trove. And of course getting others to share to THE channel you want authority passed too. i.e. youtube or site.

How many have seen the social connection lists from your connections in Google? » http://bit.ly/iWiO2x

@JadedTLC: Not to mention, bing is facebook’s boyfriend and twitter is being courted by google
@kmullett: Yes. Social is in SERPs and will change CTR of lower ranking items. Wouldn’t you click on what a friend likes?
@jeypandian: Bing recently became Google’s girlfriend http://ht.ly/4JoUM

@kristy: How do you incent users to share content?
@kmullett: The obvious answer is solve a problem with good content. H.E.L.P. them.

What are some of your favorite tools for measuring the SEO impact of social media efforts?

You won’t like this answer but generally, the same way you measure regular SEO performance. Although, I spend a significant amount of time in real time and with quoted searches to see how quick something hits. Humanize your message, Encourage conversation, Listen first, Promote less = HELP. Full article on the HELP bit is here BTW http://bit.ly/hIUZkA.

One of the best uses of social media for SEO is just encouraging discovery while crawl rate/budget is low on new sites. Funny thing is, your going to post content anyway to your blog/site, why not amplify it where people & bots are? You may see spontaneous resurgence because someone found it & re-shares via stumble, bookmark search, social search. I guess, just measure by paying attention and using google operators and quoted searches.

@tbrownseo: Do you prefer any Analytics program over another for social media metrics?
@kmullett: I test a lot of them and find I go to many to find individual metrics. Not Crowdbooster vs PostRank. Each is special.

@JoshuaTitsworth: I’ve had a lot of success with stumbleupon, the key thing I found is add a lot of relative tags.
@kmullett: Paying attention to how things are tagged and are handled on individual bookmarking/social sites is huge.

@AlanBleiweiss: MyNextCustomer is a great dashboard for conversion tracking across all points including social. Also pay attention to social buzz during campaigns – WhosTalkin, Trackur both good resources. On-site, check referrer sources beyond search engines to see SEO impact. If you push twitter or FB or whatever social, those should show up in analytics referrer sources.

@dan_patterson: Also good to use Bit.ly or another shortener, or a custom hash to track reach.
@AlanBleiweiss: Have your own URL shortener or bit.ly pro so you can manage tracking impact of social. I use yourls.org for my seoaud.it shortener. yourls.org is free, install on my own hosting platform.

Can you share your tips for discovering social media channels?

Join everything and figure it out it’s value later Again I observe rankings, do quoted searches on realtime. Watch for unique links. I noticed once that “like”ing somone elses buzz could return in serps for your name. Ok, that gets written down and tested. Bing indexes google profiles, upcoming, while google almost ignores them. Just watching then testing. Competitive equalization: using majesticseo or search explorer to find backlinks competitors are getting from social channels. Tools/sites like: Pligg, Scuttle, status.net, ping.fm, soup.io, tubemogul,

@ashbuckles: Promoting older content can keep the message out there longer. Not all content dies within days of publishing.

@ashbuckles: I find joining everything overwhelming at times. Set bookmarks, calendar events, download apps to keep up.
@kmullett: Dude, you ain’t kidding. Scary is the list of things I belong too…which you could find with google operator btw.

@dan_patterson: Do you have any channels that you’d call ‘universal,’ ie everyone should use them (besides twitter/FB)?
@kmullett: Youtube and twitvid are very powerful. Google is paying attention to video. Also efficiency sites like aggregators.

How can you make your social channels more valuable?

We categorize: RSS Feed, Social Posting/status, Article Submission, Aggregator, Press Release, Comments, Ping, Citation. Youtube for example, build value in that channel and authority. Same with StumbleUpon so it will yield better results. Automation the nasty word that doesn’t matter in certain places. Sending things to a special friendfeed or tumblr account.

Note that I don’t advocate being a dork, add some other varied and useful info into the mix, add value always.

Tie the RSS feed from your bookmarking account into an aggrigator so one bookmark becomes (n). Use carefully!

@Thos003: Are you saying google ingores the feeds on Buzz?
@VillageAdsSeo: I think he means pages like http://profiles.google.com

@matt_storms: I strongly believe that YouTube has untapped potential.
@kmullett: Yeah we have many SERPs with site link, plus youtube &/or twitvid thumbnail results. Big.

@AlanBleiweiss: maximize individual channels by recognizing each has unique audience, intent. Speak to each appropriately.

@tbrownseo: Have any tricks to making a link more appealing and result in more shares/retweets/likes, etc.?
@kmullett: I despise link bait and wish it didn’t work that well. lol Actually the problem with it, is it requires churn. Churn, because you have to dupe new people. Better to provide value w/good content. Titles matter though. My whole “social media me monster” series gets higher clicks because of the titles, but it is descriptive enough.
@AlanBleiweiss: Change up “title” (tweet) when posting same link multiple times

@dan:_patterson @kmullett RSS feeds give you free links every time you post.

Key points:

1. When you need to get crawled use social to help.
2. You’re going to post, make it visible.
3. Social is in SERPs now. Clients need to factor this in because searchers will be. Eyes will go to it.

@tbrownseo: Any comment on how powerful/useful Google’s +1 button is going to be for social and SEO?
@kmullett: Anything I would say would be speculation based on hearsay…. yes, it is likely to be a signal! lol.

@Thos003: Hey… If ya want to find the gold nuggets in my stream then you have pan through a lot of water. Can’t make it easy. =)
@kmullett: I seen your comments on +1 as a signal the other day. “in high confidence situations” might become in all situations.

@ashbuckles: I would add that social impact on SEO is easily trackable but communication is happening so make social media work for you.

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