Welcome back Rankers. I did a one hour Webinar yesterday for Smartcompany.com.au whose one of Australia’s most respected Business News website. There were a lot of questions that came out of that webinar that we just couldn’t get to in the one hour. So today I’m going to answer some of those questions because I think they’re probably common questions that a lot of people who are trying to get ranked and trying to get involved in social media and all these other things would probably be interested in. The title of the Webinar was Social Media and SEO or Social Media and Search. I’ve actually called it on our blog post “The Symbiotic Relationship of Social Media & Search” coz I think it sounds quite clever. There’s six main questions or six main areas of questions that came out.
We were talking about if you want to get ranked in the future you’ve got to publish content and one of the easiest ways to do that is to create a blog. My sense on blogging is that it should be done within the company. You can outsource it but it’s got to get approved within the company. Don’t simply just outsource it like some companies are outsourcing their twitter feeds and these sorts of things and they get themselves in all sorts of trouble. One of the questions that came up was “Should we have a group blog or individual blog on our company website. I’m not in any shape or form a professional blogger such as the likes of Darren Rowse who is at problogger and he’s answered this question many times. From an SEO perspective it doesn’t really matter, what I would say though from a Business Marketing perspective is that you just really need an area of your site where people know that they can go to that you regularly publish content about your industry. My take on it is if you’ve got 4 or 5 people within your organization that want to write, use them. Just make sure that they’ve got their authorship set up and when someone reads that they know the various individuals that happen to be writing that content. I’d be wary about doing a blog behind a brand rather than an individual because I think it just sounds like promotion whereas if it’s coming from an individual I think it carries more weight.
What CMS should we be using was another question. As I’ve said before Google loves Wordpress so why not just use Wordpress. The next question that came from that was Should we host on wordpress.com? where you can have your own blog or have it on our own site or should be set up something like subdomain.blogspot.com – host it on your own site. Even Google’s shutting down some of it’s blogging services because it recognizes that it really has to be on your own site. For the content to be found by the search engines you want to be on a dedicated server, don’t have to be but you don’t want to be on a server with 20,000 other websites which is what happens with some of these hosted solutions out there like Square Space and there’s a bunch of others. So I would use the Wordpress CMS hosted on your own server, you can get a hosted solution for $10 or so a month. It’s not hard to find a cheap way to set up your own server. You are just going to have to invest some time though learning how to set this up yourself or have someone within your organization responsible for doing this.
The other question which is the big one of course at the moment is “How is Authorship setup?” We didn’t get to touch on it much yesterday so I just wanted to show you here on this blogpost of mine. You can see here that this is by Jim, that then connects to an author page. Then if we go here you can see that goes to an author page within our site. If I was the only blogger within the organization (which I am at the moment but I hope not to be) you probably wouldn’t have an author page you would probably just go to your profile, but because we’re going to have multiple authors on this site we need to have multiple bio pages for those authors. The code itself, if we just have a quick look at it, you can see down here that within that link itself where it’s going to the bio page it says rel=author. Then if we actually go to the bio page we see that on this page itself, and this is where you link back to your Google profile, this is the Google profile here, just have a look at that code for you, and we can see here from the bio page to the Google profile page it says rel=me. So it’s telling Google that this is me. So then if I go to the Google profile and the question was also asked yesterday if you don’t have a Google+ account can you still have a Google profile? Yes, anybody can set up a Google profile you don’t need a Google+ account. Then I’ve linked that to that bio page with the code where it says rel=me. And that’s as hard as it gets. If you’re only one blogger on one site then you don’t need the bio page you can skip that step and go rel=me straight back to Google profile. It doesn’t get any harder than that. It’s really not that complex it’s just a way of double confirming that yes you wrote this copy on this site and this site says Yes that person over there wrote this copy. Really important but I won’t get into all the whys and wherefores of authorship anymore.
Finally today the question that came up a few times yesterday because we were talking about both social media and search is “Does Google+ really matter? Is it really taking off?
Well, it got something like 25 million sign ups within the first month or so and it’s still invitation only and I’m guessing it’s over 30 million by now. But don’t take my word for it that I think it’s significant and important. You just need to have a listen to or log in to Facebook this morning because everybody’s calling it Facebook+ because it’s borrowed a lot of the stuff from Google+ and the great stuff it’s been doing with circles and all these sorts of things and who gets to see what and who doesn’t get to see what. It’s incorporated into the Facebook environment so yes Google+ is here to stay and yes it’s going to be significant so get your Google profile set up and don’t forget to have a look at that Webinar if you have time, it is one hour long but you can just find it at our SEO blog.
We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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