Third time’s the charm

Google, which has dominated the search engine world and the webmail world with Gmail has had a tough time in this environment. Google Wave and Google Buzz were attempts to capture a portion of the social media market, and they both failed miserably.

Google+ is the third product offered by Google in an attempt to capture the social media space, and it seems to have gained some traction.

What does Google+ do?

Google+ does what other social media sites do: it connects people. Google+ allows you to stay in touch with family, friends, colleagues, business associates, businesses, customers, and more. In that regard, it’s a lot like Facebook.

What makes Google+ different?

Google+ isn’t exactly like (more…)

1. Choose a username that identifies you. Usernames should be easy to remember and, for branding purposes, consistent with other profiles.  If you have not claimed your company’s desired username, we recommend doing this as soon as possible on as many platforms as possible for reputation management.
2. Write a keyword rich profile.  Alter each profile slightly, but keep your message consistent.  Readability is important for a positive user experience.  Search engines monitor user behavior.  When writing your profile description, make sure it flows smoothly and avoid keyword stuffing (a deceptive technique to try and elevate a website’s search engine result ranking by including targeted keywords more often than they naturally would appear in a quality document) as this technique often causes high bounce rates.  Google has actually patented a method for ranking documents based on user behavior.
3. Add keywords to titles and posts.  Any text in your social profiles should be optimized for search by adding keywords and hashtags where appropriate.  This includes Twitter lists, YouTube videos, Facebook notes, Facebook events, image titles, image descriptions, image file names, photo albums etc.
4. Add location information when available.  Location information is more important than ever with the increase in local search ranking factors.  Google’s Search plus Your World defaults users to interest and location specific results.  In addition to the profile information, image galleries and posts often allow location information to be added.
5. Add keywords near the beginning of your posts.  The first 18 characters of your status updates comprise the SEO title so relevant keywords should be placed here.  SEO titles are essentially headlines that are crawled by search engines to determine the topic of the content. It is also important to consider readability when posting.  Keyword stuffing is not recommended.
6. Verify profiles when possible (Twitter, Google+).  Credibility, quality and value are major factors for Google Panda.  Verifying your accounts will add quality, value and credibility to your brand.

Social networking campaigns, planned properly, can increase your search engine visibility, brand awareness, credibility and ultimately, qualified traffic.  Take a few moments today to look over your profiles.  Are you optimized for search?

Drop me a line and let me know what SEO challenges you’re facing these days: ali (at) aliharris.com