Are you social enough on the web?

You might already have a Facebook page so you’re not totally in the dark when it comes to online social networks. But what are you supposed to be Digging? What’s a Twitter? And isn’t Orkut that magic alien from Masters of the Universe?

Of course you know having strong website content and good search engine optimization (SEO) are keys to getting your site ranked highly on search engines like Google, so the more you spread the word about your product or service and the more linkbacks you have to your site the better.

Keeping up with social media can be somewhat of a daunting task though. There seems to be a new site launched every week. Depending on how many sites you belong to, or want to belong to, your list of usernames and passwords can build up to overwhelming lengths.

If you happen to use more than one social network though, which is likely seeing how “49 million people visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008” (Comscore, worldwide), then there is some good news.

Four new social networking platforms, Facebook Connect, MyspaceID, Google Friend Connect, and Power.com, are trying to make it easier for you to manage all of your accounts. The goal: expand your social network with half the effort. After all, more manageable networking means more potential SEO for your site, right?

So now all you have to do is decide which platform to use…

Tech Crunch broke it down like this:

“All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site – Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc. – can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.”

Facebook Connect:

Facebook Connect takes your Facebook profile information, your picture, and your friends and expands upon them by looking for others with common interests. It basically does the legwork for you, taking your login information and applying it to your Twitter, Digg, Citysearch, etc. accounts to make it easier to sign in and manage content and profile information or create new accounts.

Your other social networks link back to your Facebook profile, where your network is allowing you to advertise your product or services.

Myspace ID:

MyspaceID works on the same basic principles as Facebook Connect, however functionality is still being flushed out. Myspace looks to be a step behind Facebook when it comes to sending data back to your Myspace feed. However, Myspace supports Open ID, which Facebook does not, and that could mean more potential third party partners.

Social Networks that support OpenID could be hesitant to partner with Facebook who has basically shunned tools like OpenID and OAuth in favor of their own login ID which they will own.

Power.com

In May, when Facebook Connect was announced on the heels of the news of MyspaceID and Google Friend Connect, the first in the trend of all-encompassing social networking platforms to actually launch was the Brazilian-based platform Power.com.

Unlike its competitors who enable social access through a universal ID, Power delivers a dashboard to users and branded their service “social inter-networking.” Currently offering sign-in ability to Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, and Hi5 accounts, Power.com has its sights set on centralizing social networks rather than owning your online ID.

Power has created a single site interface where you can view and jump to all of your social network pages. Users can navigate seamlessly from Facebook to Myspace to Orkut in a matter of seconds without having to logout and log back in.

When you sign into Power.com using your Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, or MSN account ID and password, it scrapes that site for you and immediately creates a profile page where you can manage your account.

Google Friend Connect:

Google Friend Connect adds applications to your website, so your friends can interact right on your site. It’s goal is simple: make the web more social. Like Power.com, Google Friends Connect is not in the game to promote itself.

There is a little more leg work involved too. Users interested in Google Friend Connect can get started by copying a few lines of Java Script from the Google site and pasting them onto their page.

Google Friend Connect has partnered with Facebook’s competitor becoming a component of MyspaceID.

How Do You Benefit?

Since all four platforms were announced around the same time (May), the new race, for now anyway, seems to be for the right to become the proprietary online ID.

When users are logging into their favorite sites with their Myspace or Facebook IDs, it presents even more incentive for them to keep up those profiles. If the two major social networks are your home, then you want to pack it full of as much information as you can to lead your Digg, Twitter, or Orkut followers back there. Once you have them on your Facebook page, you can lead them to your website.

The verdict is still out on which platform the major third-party sites will choose to partner with. Twitter has been mentioned by both MyspaceID and Facebook Connect. Power.com already acts as home base for both Myspace and Facebook sites, plus Orkut and Hi5 are on board.

According to Venture Beat:

“Facebook gained nearly two million new US users from May to June of this year, while MySpace lost about a million, according to the latest data from comScore. MySpace is still nearly twice the size, though, at 72.8 million national users versus Facebook’s 37.4 million. Facebook has, meanwhile, grown 34 percent since June 2007, while MySpace has grown only two percent” (comScore Media Metrix).

If you truly want to reap the SEO benefits of these social network platforms, signing up for a plethora of third-party sites is only the first step. Making the effort to update content, and more importantly make sure that content is relevant to your product or service on these sites, is key. Remember, every blog you produce, Twitter, or Digg you make could potentially drive more traffic to your site.

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What Cuil’s biggest problem was – as Jason Lee Miller wrote, it’s one that other search engine competitors have all had – is not that their search algorithm or even indexing ability is bad, it’s that they can’t scale the way Google has been able to. Unless you have, say, Microsoft money, being able to handle the petabytes of data Google processes on an hourly basis.

What does that mean for us out here, businesses looking to be found, customers looking to find, and we obsessive web geeks?

Well, not much, really. Cuil isn’t all bad – it has a larger index than Google and its tile-based search results are pretty nifty, but search results aren’t always perfect (funny case in point: search “cuil debut disaster” on cuil. As of today, the results are, well, interesting).

That’s the problem with many “Google-Killers” – the new things they bring to the party are neat, but not enough to unseat the firmly entrenched Google, who have not yet lost their place as pace-setter for the industry.

That means, for the time being, Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo and MSN Live Search, are the standards for SEO. That’s obvious, but with new players getting the hype, it’s almost reassuring to know there is the SEO rock that is Google.

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Adobe, the maker of Flash and its related products, has created an indexable Flash file, meaning information that used to be hidden to search engines are now in the open. Google, of course, was a pioneer, with Yahoo riding the coattails of this improvement.

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them.

What does this mean for businesses? Well, it means rich, artistic design won’t exclude you from search results – before this file index came out, many businesses had to choose between a vivid Flash presentation or really powerful search results. Now, you can have your cake and eat it to.

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Google is the premier search engine on the web today. There’s no denying it, and both users and the stock market alike are clear indicators of how important Google is to search engine efforts. In some ways, Google controls the Internet economy moreso than even the all-powerful Microsoft. Appearing high on Google’s search pages for a given term – related to whatever business you’re involved in – is more valuable than any billboard or television commercial.

But is Google really the gateway to all web business? When a search engine optimization specialist tells you “Your site isn’t Google-friendly” does that mean you have to kowtow to the one company whose motto is “Do no evil”?

Yes and maybe. The same strategies that work well on Google work well on almost any search engine – Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, etc. Relevant keywords, related content, powerful links to and from related, high traffic sites – they work regardless of the search engine.

But should your site be written to appeal to Google’s search bots? Or should you write to your human site visitors? Can you do both?

In an ideal world, yes, writing for both Google and other search engine bots and human visitors should operate the same way. But while search engines prize keyword density, human readers can usually tell if a site is designed for search engines. Search engine optimized copy is not quite as natural as normal marketing copy.

For example, here’s a paragraph Google might read as very powerful for selling web design:

360 PSG, a web development company, offers website design, custom web applications, and a powerful content management system for any business website. Our web designs fit any small business. They work for e-commerce, online portfolio pieces, and online news releases.

Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a little dry. At the same time, it’s readable, simple, and clear.

Another tack we could have taken was straight-up advertising-style copy:

Take control of your website with 360 PSG. Our powerful web designs can help your business establish a strong web presence. Our Fission CMS makes it easy – just login, click, type and save, and you can have unlimited pages, and unlimited web options. Find out more today.

That’s not bad either, as ad copy – it’s inviting, it sells our system as easy to use, and effective, but you’ll notice there are very few words or phrases in that paragraph that count as keywords.

In that first paragraph, we had “website design,” “custom web applications,” and “content management system.” The second paragraph had none of those words together.

If someone is searching for those particular services or products, the first paragraph is more likely to attract search engine results. The second paragraph might be more effective selling to human readers, though it’s much less likely to attract search engine results.

So it’s a fine line to walk – on one hand you want to attract search engine traffic. On the other, you need to drive sales through your site.

Here at 360 PSG, we focus on both – the subtle techniques that boost search engine ranking, plus the effective copy that attracts visitors to a sale once they’re at your site.

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Links, in human terms, show that like minded people are seeking out and reading your site content, whether its an online store, a blog, or some other type of website. Social networks and social bookmarking sites and indexes like Digg or Myspace are great places to drum up that important related traffic.

Incoming links are any link on another site that points to your site. Search engines index sites and their outgoing and incoming links – the more you have, the better. But while almost any incoming link can help your search engine ranking, the best links come from high-traffic sources related to your website topic. For example, this blog discusses web design, web development and web marketing strategies. Good links for us are similarly focused sites – a post on the Blogdesignblog about good blog design is related to our web design topics. A post about the future of search engine optimization on the Search Engine Roundtable relates well to this particular post.

The above links both to our own site and the blogs and websites I mentioned will all be counted by search engines as topical, related incoming links to those sites, and measured as topical, related outgoing links from this site.

But, as a blog author, I had to actively search for those above topics. I used the Google Blog Search to find them, but there are other ways to get those types of incoming links.

Social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook are good places to post links and material related to your particular industry or topic so people looking for that type of information can find them. For those types of services, you can create a profile and post links to your site, with categories that people with related interests can see.

Social bookmarking sites are similar in that shared interests can draw attention to your website, but sites like Digg, Technorati and Reddit target specifically news-style articles. That might mean you have to go through the work of generating your own content, but that content in turn is put into a feed read by over 500,000 (in the case of Digg) users who rate, read, and discuss your article. Those comments might be full messages, but users also “digg” or give your site “authority” through links. The more links or diggs you get, the more eyes will see your article, and in turn your site.

One important note: People – particularly the savvy Digg community – can see through cheap tricks, black hat tactics and spam like X-ray. Don’t cheat with duplicated, plagiarized content or BS links. It’s not cool, and could get you blacklisted in the long-run.

So get out there – make friends, discuss your business, industry or hobbies – it all can track back to your business.

PS – Digg this article! Click the icon below!

HT: Lorne Fade Design for the pic

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