Oh the Tangled Web We Weave
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I’m taking a break from deep topics to write about something shallow: Social networking. But hey, I mean shallow in a good way. Social networking has a huge reach. Yes, there’s something vaguely totalitarian and Hitler-esque about having “followers” on Twitter. But Twitter has been used to get the word out about the fixed elections in Iran and to track emergency weather. Two million people are following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. I know that Jane Fonda had a knee operation because she tweeted.
I don’t know about the usefulness of all that information, but I do know that information feeds SEO – that stands for search engine optimization. It’s the magic stuff you do to get people to find your wisdom on the web – the keywords, text and phrases you embed in your content. I’m going to share what I’ve learned recently about all this from some experts. Let’s start with
SEO guru Scott Edwards.
Scott sets up social networking sites to help people group themselves by their interests and get content they want. There are more than 200 million users on Facebook. That makes Facebook something like the fifth largest country in the world, a country without borders but formed by people who are obsessed about high school. The high school connection aside, Scott encouraged me to start Facebook pages related to projects we’re working on. Good idea. Over coffee at Peet’s he also told me about a site called fmylife.com, one of the most active on the web. People contribute a few lines about something terrible that happened to them and end with the telling initials FML.” It’s sick, but people like to contribute and it will make you laugh.
Buzzwords and buzzphrases have become important. There’s a company called Hubspot that will sell you some software that makes your content more search-friendly. They’ve done something smart – popularized a buzzphrase called “inbound marketing.” They practically own it – Google it and you’ll see Hubspot’s fingerprints all over it. That’s called having authority over a search phrase. Hubspot told me that DocuCinema has good authority, and 500 Words also has good authority as a search phrase, so I must be doing something right.
Scott and I also talked about Digg.com. This site gives people a chance to vote on sites they like – and if you make it to the front page of Digg by virtue of these recommendations, you are gold. There’s stumbleupon.com, a useful site with a funny name. When you sign up, stumbleupon asks you about your interests and tries to throw interesting websites your way. It’s a bit like wandering in the library and plucking books from the shelves. It may lead you to cuteoverload.com, a waste of time but very good if you like photos of sleeping kittens.
You can join LinkedIn, sometimes called Facebook for people with jobs, and post your resume. If you really want to geek out, you can write a blog and optimize the title of it by putting the most search-friendly word first and then go in descending order of searchability. That would make the best title for this post “Web Weave We Tangled Oh.” Hmm. Guess you can’t optimize everything.
