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This week, I thought we would kind of pick up where we left off, on the topic of content and social media. This time we will focus more on your audience.

First up, you must be able to listen! What do your readers want from you? What do they find valuable? Why are they in your network to begin with?

Social media is (well, should be) more about the quality of your friends/followers. Not seeing how many people you can get. Are you there to just promote your business or are you there to develop relationships with your audience/customers?

Sure, there’s no doubt that many people are there to build their brand, but how are they going about it? Instead of just sending links and products out, tell people how the product will benefit them. Give people as much info as you can. One example I can offer is if you see a “tweet” about your company or product, reply to the person. Don’t just let other people answer the question or whatever it may be. This example came from today when I saw a question about my company. Even though I knew other people that didn’t work here were answering, I replied anyways. I think it shows that you are listening and getting involved in the conversation. That is just one more person that will probably go to our site and check it out.

A couple other ideas…

Jessica from TopRank suggests running promotions involving user generate articles, videos, images or other content that can be shared, promoted and recognized. Great idea. This gets your audience involved more than they normally would be.

Or, you could simply ask your audience what they want from your blog, Twitter or Facebook page. It never hurts to ask right?

Social media, marketing, content, can all be put together to help build your brand. And not to mention, they are all free!

Lee Odden recently made an excellent point. He said, “The lesson for Public Relations is to ensure news content is not only search engine friendly, but social media friendly.”

We all have seen by now that a lot of information gets shared through social networks. No one wants to see press releases and pitches all over their social networks they use but there are ways to create content that is interesting and more likely to be shared. You can use social bookmarks, RSS feeds, and eye-catching buttons, widgets, and icons. Not only is there sharing, but commenting, voting, and linking. If your content gets to be popular among readers on social networks, then it gets more exposure, which means more traffic, and better search engine results.

Use keywords. Share a video on Twitter or Facebook, add in some keywords, make your content interesting and people will pick up on it. Then they will share it, and link to it.

As PR professionals, wouldn’t it be easier to take an interesting article and try to promote it through the social networking scenes instead of calling companies to try to get them to talk about or publish your content? I know I am more than likely to click on an interesting link that a friend has posted about something than to go read a press release, or even a press release I receive in email. If I see an article that I like, that is interesting, I will “tweet” about it. Then usually, one of my followers will pick it up and they will tweet about it, which of course like I said before, content gets shared, and that means more traffic to your site.

Just remember, improving your visibility on social networks and other sites also means improving visibility in search engines.

Get your name, your brand, your content AND those keywords out there, and you are sure to see results.

I ran across an older article today titled “Design and Content Tips” from Webreference.com. Surprisingly, it offered some refreshing content tips that you might not have heard in a while.

The author mentions four main things:

Categorize
Be A Site Visitor
Consistency and Predictability
Loud Colors Do Not Equal Creativity

I think the most important one is “Be A Site Visitor”, particularly putting yourself in the visitors’ shoes. How would you go about finding a product on your site?

The author makes a really good point: To pretend like you have never seen the site or knew about the content. Think outside of the box and think about what is not so obvious to everyday users. I actually thought about this point myself the other day. I was working with a site that had small, white text. I thought, well I know what all this says without struggling but would the average reader? Since the text was a little hard to read for even me who looks at that type of site all day, it would probably be really hard for visitors.

Take these things into consideration when dealing with your own content, and you may get better results. 

Read the full article here.

I’ve put together a small list of content tips for you. Here are the links and some main points in each article:

Website Content Tips

• Aim for a conversational tone.

• Keep things interesting.

• Offer something to visitors.

SEO Friendly Content

• Approach from your readers’ perspective.

• Select the appropriate keywords.

Tips for Getting Something on the Page

• Create a resource list using other people’s work.

• Use social networking sites to see what’s hot.

• Make things look pretty by using images.

31 content tips and ideas for your B2B email newsletter

• Keep a content folder.

• Develop reserve content.

• Sign-up to your competitors’ newsletters.

And here are some great articles from Matt Tuens about writing and conversions that will be good to read.

Hope all these tips help when you are trying to come up with your own content!

In June 2008, Google announced it would start indexing Flash content. Great! Right?

While there are some benefits, there are still some negatives that you should be aware of.

Matthew Elshaw has recently come out with a post about the negative sides of Flash, especially for small business owners.

A couple he mentions are:

1. Different Content is not on Different URLs

-All your content will be on one file. There’s no additional pages or individual elements for Google to index.

2. Basic SEO Tags are Still Missing

-Anchor text, alt image text, H1 tags will all be lost.

Another great thing Matthew brings up is that

3. Flash Doesn’t Receive a Lot of Links

-People won’t be able to copy and link back to your text.

Most SEOs would agree that you shouldn’t go crazy with Flash on your site, but you also shoudn’t get rid of it completely. Use it to make your website more interactive, just keep it scaled back, so you still get good search engine rankings.

Maybe some of these problems will be worked out in the future. For now, just be smart about your content.

For more information, visit these blog posts that also talk about SEO and Flash:

http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2008/07/flash-is-still-too-flashy-for.php

http://searchengineland.com/are-the-search-engines-really-indexing-flash-16942

Also, check out Adobe’s Search Engine Optimization Technology Center.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all announce a new tag that will get rid of your duplicate content problems.

In the past, SEO’s have had to worry things such as session ID’s, tracking ID’s, source strings, link parameters, and other variables in URL’s. Not anymore. Now, you will have more control over the URL returned in search results. The new tag goes in the “head” section of your web pages.

You can find an example of the new tag on the Webmaster Central blog. The article also contains a short Q and A at the bottom that might help answer some of your lingering questions.

Google says they will “take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.”

WebProNews did an interview with Matt Cutts about the new canonical tag. Matt says watching the video is the easiest way to learn about the new tag quickly.

Also, you can check out Matt’s blog, where he further explains the canonical link tag here.

Over at Blogsessive, Alex Cristache, takes a look at SEO-friendly content. Alex explains what SEO friendly content is and also offers a couple techniques for effective optimization.

His techniques are all about keywords. He says when it comes to keywords, to think “natural”. In other words, what would the common user search for? It’s also good to avoid unnecessary repetitions and stuffing.

The next tip is to spread those keywords you came up with throughout your article. His advice is to start from the beginning by using your main phrase in the first sentence or paragraph. Depending on the length of your post, you can try repeating a few times, as long as it does not sound bad for a reader.

Alex adds, “Regardless to what some people think, there’s nothing wrong with helping out good content find its way to interested search engine users, as long as you don’t go overboard and turn into search engine spam. The line is thin.”

Read Alex Cristache’s article here.

In today’s post I wanted to share some content articles from Pubcon, a recent marketing conference. Navneet Kaushal has published a few articles with some great tips. Some of those include:

There was also some mobile tips in Navneets notes:

Another thing he mentions is to remember that good content will cost some money and getting it could be the most expensive part of SEO campaign. He says for in house content creation, it will take a lot of training.

Read Navneet’s notes from the conference on his site:

Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation

Ground-Up
SEO Content Development as Pure Business Strategy

He also covered a session on duplicate content. You can read about it here.

In a recent post, Lee Odden ask the question, “Why would you want your “members access only” content available to search engines?”

Some sites have most of their content behind a login. Usually, search engine spiders can’t find the content behind the login to index and include in the search results.

You may want to rethink the decision to have your content hidden behind a login. Lee says, “The more web pages a search engine can find, index and include in the search results, the more entry points there are for new customers to find your web site content.” Of course, you want as many customers as possible to visit your site right?

There are reasons to hide your content however. An exception would be if the content were time sensitive. He points out that if the content were time sensitive, it wouldn’t make sense to allow search engines to index it, because obviously outdated content is no good to customers.

Lee wants to know if you made any of your content available to search engines that were previously hidden behind a login. What were the hurdles and how did it turn out?

Read the article and comment here.

Today I just wanted to share a website that I think is very useful for anyone looking for content tips. The site is Darren Rowse’s www.ProBlogger.net. The site has a lot of great information. He talks mostly about how to make your blog better, but here is the archive of his posts that focuses on content.

Darren has some “out-of-the-box” suggestions that you don’t normally see discussed too often. Punctuation, reader engagement, creativity, repeating content, and if your post matters, are just a few of the things he talks about.

Also, while you’re there, don’t forget to browse around the rest of his site to check out his blogging tips.