Here we are—the last step in creating exciting social SEO for your boring business. So far, you’ve learned that creating great content—addressing potential clients’ needs and concerns about your service—is a great way to engage them with your service. You’ve also learned how to increase your social media followers and use them to spread your content across the web.

Today, we look at step 3 in the process, as discussed by Ross Tavendale in “3 Steps to Social SEO for Your Boring-Ass Clients.” Once again, we’re producing great content. This time the content is a Facebook page.
Start by setting up a Facebook iFrame, which is basically a mini website within a website. Set the width of your iFrame at 520px so visitors won’t be irritated by having to scroll across. Then:

• Use Facebook ads to send traffic to your new page.
• Treat your Facebook page as you would any other landing page. That is, test the effectiveness of the various elements, including headlines and images.
• Interact with your Facebook audience. Share links to relevant information. “Like” visitors’ comments. Ask questions, either in regular posts or with quizzes and polls.

Okay, so now you have a nice little bag of tricks for creating buzz-worthy content to turn your average, unexciting business into a social media juggernaut and create some excitement around your service. Just remember that these aren’t one-time strategies any more than “regular” SEO is a one-time strategy.

Analyze your results, note which strategies work best, and do more of that. Create a schedule to make sure you put out content regularly, and run contests or other campaigns regularly, too. This will keep people interested and give them reason to come back.

So there you go: with a little creativity, any business can be exciting.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Madison county, IL Insurance Defense Lawyer.

Welcome back! If you read step 1 of this three-part series, you know that it really is possible to make your boring business exciting enough to generate social buzz. But you need multiple tactics to sustain your social SEO efforts long-term, so we’re back with more ways to create exciting social SEO.

Step 2 also comes courtesy of “3 Steps to Social SEO for Your Boring-Ass Clients” by Ross Tavendale, and once again we’re going to produce great content. This time you are going to convince other people in your industry to share it.

How do you do this? Become the go-to news site for your industry, and share the content of other people along with your own. So:

• Recruit your best writers to create at least one piece of unique content to post each day. Then add value by pulling in news and information from other sources.
• Add widgets to stream your recent Twitter and Facebook activity on your site. This allows your site visitors to see your social activities and might encourage them to follow you there.
• Find top content producers in your industry and ask for contributions or see if they’ll add you to their Twitter list or blogroll.
• Subscribe to top blogs in your industry through a blog reader. Then tweet about your favorite posts each day. Schedule tweets spaced throughout the day with a service like Hootsuite or Buffer. Make sure you mention the author’s Twitter name.

It takes a while to get all of this set up, but once you do, it should only take you a few minutes each day to post content, scan your blog reader and set up your tweets for the day. Soon your followers will increase and so will your retweets.

See? You’re not quite as boring as you thought.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Long Beach Expungement Law Attorney.

Is your business boring? Of course it is. Legal dramas play well on TV, but in real life, people generally find legal proceedings dry and boring. Does that mean you can’t take advantage of social media to boost your SEO? Of course not, it just means you need to be more creative. You can be exciting and social even if your business is boring.

Ross Tavendale discusses this topic in “3 Steps to Social SEO for Your Boring-Ass Clients,” and explains how he implemented exciting social SEO for a client in personal injury claims. You can use similar techniques for your own boring business.

The key to social SEO is producing great content, and that’s the main theme in Tavendale’s plan. Great content catches your visitors’ attention and makes them want to come back for more.

How can you create this great content? Get others to do some of the work for you. For example:

• Make a Q&A section for your site. People can ask questions and you can answer those questions. Short video answers add excitement. People love online videos.
• Have a contest. Tavendale had college students create blog posts on topics he picked and then promote the content to their friends, asking them to share it, too. The winner (with the most shares) got a summer job, so they were motivated. He got the universities and industry bloggers involved in creating press as well. All this garnered a lot of backlinks and social shares for the business.

Think your business is too boring to even do this? Think again. People who buy your product or service will have questions about it. Take advantage of that. And everybody loves contests. Just make sure the prize is something worthwhile.

Stay tuned for the next steps you can take to make your social SEO more exciting.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Bankruptcy Lawyer in Albuquerque.

photo courtesy BJN

When a person searches for “Kentucky fried chicken“, Google’s primary goal is to try to understand whether you’re in Kentucky looking for fried chicken or in New Jersey (like I am) looking for the local KFC. In a nutshell, that’s an example of how a searcher’s environment… their associations and place in the world give context to the search that’s taking place.

With that goal firmly in their sights, Google has helped move us from the world where rankings are driven by keyword density to one where context is king. They are looking for cues of what the searcher (you and I) is really looking for when they search for Kentucky fried chicken. Take that same kind of richness of context and apply it to the text itself on your website. It has become increasingly important to ensure your website’s copy not only addresses your visitors’ core search, but their motivations and environment as well. What do I mean? In a simple example, when a person is interested in immigration, they also are likely to have questions or ideas about becoming a citizen, the naturalization process, getting a green card… legally, work in the US, visas, worker status, help and more. For both your user and your search engine rankings, this sort of in-depth understanding of the words and concepts related to your topic is key as we move into 2010 and 2011.

Great, Clay. You’ve proven you’re a nerd and like tangents (like Google does???). How can you put this sort of Latent Semantic Analysis (“LSA”) to work for me? I’ve found LSA is great for rankings but, more practically, it’s great for giving you ideas on where to go with your web content development. If you can tap in to the relationships and concepts associated with your topic, it makes it much easier to produce interesting copy that’s useful to your visitors.

Here’s how you can put LSA to work for you using “motorcycle accidents” as an example. Search for the phrase and note the first web URL they return that has good content on the landing page. Take that URL, copy it, and visit the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” select the Website content radio button. Paste the URL into the input box and check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” checkbox. Click to search and Google will go out and gather LSA ideas for you! The results returned include grouped keywords centered around concepts.

The first URL returned is http://accident-law.freeadvice.com/auto/motorcycle_accident_statistics.htm. Analysis shows related concepts like personal injury, motorcycle helmets, safety, learning to ride, head on crash, motor bike crashes, etc. Note those LSA keywords.

Move on to another top URL returned by Google: http://www.vtwinmama.com/accident_survivors.htm. Using the Google Keyword Tool on this URL, we get more keyword concepts like Harley Davidson, motorcycle safety, leather motorcycle jacket, motorcycle class and more. Each URL you research will return variants that are often useful. Of course, there is a lot of repetition of concepts like motorcycle accident attorneys and motorcycle safety but there are always gems in the results.

Thoughts?

I was recently asked if syndicating or licensing content would have a negative impact on the author website’s rankings. Was syndicated content seen as duplicate content? My answer may be useful to others, so here it is in a nutshell:

Maliciously duplicated content (with the intent to deceive through redirects, multiple pages on the same domain, etc.) will have a negative effect, but syndicated/licensed content has been on Google’s radar for a while as an exception. The short answer is that they do a pretty good job of recognizing who published the content first and it isn’t likely there will be any penalty to your site for syndicating your articles. A longer answer is found in the Google post on duplicate content here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359. They say :

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

The noindex meta tag on the syndicated version would be the ultimate way to ensure it didn’t get indexed and become problematic. I’m not sure of how many publishers will like that contractual provision, though.

I went on to mention the development strategy of www.theknot.com – they licensed content with Yahoo! and used that to establish themselves in the marketplace. It didn’t hurt them a bit… My advice to this particular person was to go for it (syndicating/licensing her content) just make sure you have a few contractual items in place to ensure proper “credit” is given to your site.

When working on a law firm SEO campaign, one of the trouble spots can sometimes be finding content. A lawyer’s time is valuable and, as a service provider, my team can’t spend all day with an attorney asking him/her for details of the practice. So the challenge becomes creating quality, easy content about a law firm without disturbing the firm more than necessary and without having to cite case law itself.

There are a number of content creation methods but let’s look at one example of low-hanging fruit: video. Yes, yes – everyone knows that online video is great and YouTube results get good rankings in Google. But what I’m talking about is using a lawyer video as the source of text content for the firm’s website. A prime example of easy content can be found on the website from Phoenix criminal lawyers Billar & Donald. The firm presents good information within the video… let’s use that on the website too! Take the time to transcribe the audio to text and include a few links in the text when doing so. Hey, maybe even experiment with publishing it as a PDF transcription. What’s great is that all of this can be done without having to produce new copy or pass the content in front of the powers that be for pre-publish approval.

In all, “easy content” can be produced as fast as you can listen and type if you use a video as the source. Sure, the search engines will eventually get good enough at understanding video to make this practice unnecessary, but as a content development technique – let’s say for accessibility – it’s a nice one to keep in your back pocket.

A quick search turns up a few service providers, for those not interested in doing the transcription themselves:

• www.videotranscription.net
• www.gmrtranscription.com
• www.transcriptionsservice.com
• www.transcriptionstar.com

P.S. It looks like Google has issued a standard for video transcripts.