While infographics got their start on news sites, even well before the internet was around (remember back in the pre-internet days when they used to pop up occasionally in newspapers), infographics really took off this past year as a great way to get a significant amount of traffic, and of course, links.  But as all SEOs know, any worthy “lots of links fast” strategy tends to be used and abused.  And wow, they are definitely getting abused.

But for all those SEOs out there pumping out infographics at an alarming rate for all their own – and their client’s – websites, you can bet many of them haven’t stopped to think about the long term consequences, only the short term link gain.  Short term is traffic (yea!) but long term could end up being a bit more sketchy.

True, many SEOs argue that links via infographics are quality links.  And while some of those links might be quality, just as many of not more are pretty poor quality.  It would take nothing for Google to flip a switch and discount a majority of those links obtained via infographics.

How Google can spot the infographic footprint
Images are already indexed in Google in the image search – along with the image size – so it wouldn’t be a stretch for Google to add some sort of penalty (or not so much penalty, but maybe a signal to discount links) for landing pages where an image length is longer than 1500 and wider than say 500 or 800 pixels, because that is an image size not used often for anything but infographics.  While not all infographics are the long and skinny, a fair amount of them are.  And I am willing to bet when you oh-so-conveniently included the copy and paste code for your infographic that you failed to include a no-follow tag (of the dozen or so I checked, none included the no-follow attribute in the code, which Google would argue that all webmasters should do when they are unsure of the quality, or legitimacy, of an incoming link.

They could also go further with the larger landscape infographics, using OCR technology (which we know they have the ability to use on images) to be able to differentiate between photos and infographics.

It could also potentially be used as a signal for the dreaded over-optimization penalty.  And in that scheme of things, one or two infographics could be kosher, while a site rocking 30+ (and yes, there are definitely sites with that many and more) infographics could be a little more suspect, especially if those infographics aren’t linked to from the main site.  A fair number of infographics sit on orphan pages that link to other pages on the site, yet no main pages on the site link to the one with the infographic one – particularly the types that are spamming Angry Birds infographics on a recipes site.

Spying on the infographics your fellow SEOs & competitors are sharing
And does the evil side of you want to know how many SEOs are using and abusing infographics, aside from the ones you notice spamming them on Twitter?  Simply add one of the many “SEO expert” circles into Google+, make sure you are logged into your Google account, and then do an image search for infographic.  At the top of the page will be all those spammy infographics than SEOs have shared, showing through the wonder that is Search Plus Your World.  And yes, the spam team can easily add those same SEOs into their circles and see this too, if they wanted.

Likewise, hit up Pinterest, add a bunch of SEOs to your friends, and see what infographics they have pinned.  And this also works well for checking what infographics competitive websites are pushing, especially when they are doing the Angry Birds on a recipe site type infographics that you might not otherwise notice.

Should you bandwagon?
If you haven’t jumped on the infographic bandwagon yet and are tempted to, weigh the pros and cons of tossing a no-follow on the copy and paste link code you provide.  And yes, infographics can send a ton of traffic just from the sharing, especially the creative and well done ones, aside from the benefits of the links.  Some will argue that a Google penalty would be a stretch, it isn’t too farfetched that Google can simply tweak their algo to discount those infographic links anyway.

Going the way of the dodo bird?
Are infographics for links a dying art?  I am sure we will all be annoyed by them for years to come, the same way link bait persists.  And yes, they will clearly be effective for getting the initial traffic from people sharing them… and rediscovering and resharing them again later.  But don’t count on those links you gain benefitting your site from an SEO perspective (aside from the straight clickthrough traffic), especially because we know that Google is leaning towards discounting the benefits of all kinds of links when it comes to their algorythm…. can you say hello social?  You need to think ahead whatever the next big link gain thing is…. Or is it already here and you don’t know it yet

Q&A Moderator: Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com

Speakers:Sean Carlos, CEO, Antezeta Web Marketing (@seancarlos)
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo (@janetdmiller)
Daniel Dulitz, Product Manager, Google (@dulitz)
Monica Wright, Social Media Editor, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land (@monicawright)

First up, we start with the Google+ rep, Daniel Dulitz.  He says you can ignore Google+ if you’re hoping to do well with Google Search.

A user’s path to good content ranking: give the user what she wants

Appearance: tell the user why its good.

Make content stand out; display your reputation click.

With Google authorship, connect web content with your author profile.  Use rich snippets (use schema.org microdata).

Then: first, who wrote it (with profile) and who is interested in it (+1s)

Effects on search: show richer content, show the author; show the site’s Google+ page annotations from your circles, so visitors can see who +1s and who shared the sites in search results.

Consider search results as a way to insert your own stamp on things.

Power of one – enliven your content with rich snippets; develop reputation with authorship; reach fans with g+; help people recommend your content with +1s.

Next up is Sean Carlos and he talks alot about Google “direct connect”.  To be eligible, companies must cross-link their G+ page to their website.  But, you do not need to put a Google+ badge on the site.

If you feel Google+ is too visible, you can opt out of indexing. On the other hand, if you can’t rank #1 for search terms, let authorship make it stand out more in the search results.

Do note that “related places and people” is moving adwords further down the page on the right hand side, usually below the fold.

Next is Janet Driscoll Miller

Using direct connect means it is something additional for Google suggest to display in drop down, which really helps if negative results are showing in search suggest.

Create a link between Google+ and your website.  Either use the code snippet or badge.

Only 3% of fortune 100 havea Google+ badge on their site.

Think about where you put your +1 buttons on the site.  Make it easy for people to +1

She also notes that the plugin AddThis didn’t add Google+ functionality until December.  If you are using older code, the old Google button only adds a bookmark.

Last is Monica Wright.

Organize your circles, categorize audience commenters, newbies, loyalists, researchers, etc

Is it ok to duplicate Facebook and Google+?  Yes, because it is usually a different audience.

First up is Tami from Buddy Media, with a series of tips for promoting your business on Facebook.

Keep posts short.  Posts under 80 characters have 30% higher engagement.  This is especially true for photos, events and video.

Post on Thursdays and Fridays.  Engagements on these days are 18% higher than on the other days of the week.

Photos and plain status posts work well.  Photos have a 53% higher engagement.

Have clear calls to action.  You want to use terms like: like, post, take, comment, submit.  You want to avoid terms like: order, see, become a fan, shop

If you sell, sell softly. Using more direct/aggressive language doesn’t work as well.  Does it smell too sales-y?

Place questions at the end of the post.  Posts that end with a question (rather than beginning or middle) have a 15% higher engagement rate.

Ask a question well.  You should use: when, where, would, should.  Avoid asking why questions.  because it can put people on the defensive and requires people to defend what they think.

Use fill in the blank posts as a way to encourage engagement.

Mine data for fan insights, then use that information to posting things that get a higher comment rate.

Be topical and relevant to what is happening now.  Super Bowl posts had 60% higher engagement on game day.  99.7% higher but less than 30% of brands posted about the Super Bowl, so they missed the opportunity.

Winning the Super Bowl resulted in the Giants aquiring 2x more fans during the game.

Understand what is a bigger ask.  It is far easier for people to like than share.  So don’t expect to get the same share rates as like rates.

Actually ask for something…  less than 1% of postss contain a share call to action.  When posts said share this, they had a 77% higher share rate.

Post visual content, if you want people to share, make it visual.

Support social sharing.  Embedding sharing buttons to drive referral traffic is a great way to increase traffic.

Why is social sharing so important?  People are 2x as likely to trust information emailed or shared on a social network from a friend.  The average Facebook sharer has 240 friends (83% hgiher than average).  And on average, a single share drives 6 new visitors.  And customers aquired via  shares have 26% higher average order value than other sales… these are highly valued customers.

Next up is Aaron Friedman (@aaronfriedman) on targeting audiences and maximizing engagement.

Facebook is great because it has 800M users, engaged audience, 52.1% sharing on web.  But unfortunately, it is hard to target how to reach a larger audience and get your posts seen.

Don’t  buy likes, it will hurt more than help. Don’t be afraid to buy some ads to further target your audience.

Use the facebook advertising tool to define your audience.

Example: Bass Fishing Favorites now has 66k fans.  The cost was  $0.15 per like with an overall $6k ad spend. Effective for fairly cheap.

Tools he recommends include Kenshoo social: quick, advanced targeting options, lower cost per fan (bid management helps optimize what is and isn’t working).

It is about quantity vs quality on Facebook.

When sharing, chose your image carefully and create a great description that is not truncated.  For your title, you want about 95 characters, description about 297 characters.

Dan Robbins is up last.  For Facebook audience development, never pay or bribe for likes.

Types of content they post: photo galleries and videos, both raw and polished footage links: website content, product reviews, event coverage and videos – contests and special offers – market research – fan calls to action.

Handling of user posted content:  make sure you answer every questions in a timely manner; ignore the antagonists; remove only pure spam and hate posts; leave questions directed at the community for the community; check hidden posts daily (check the spam feed)

As fan base grows, community answers a lot of the questions posed to the company.

3 Facebook publishing philosphies: post only quality relevant content; once posted, forever posted; time is not of the essence – make sure you fact check.

Why people unlike brands on Facebook: too many posts; too much marketing; repetitive or boring content; only liked to take advantage of an offer; didn’t offer enough deals.

Top 3 KPIs: weekly like growth likes, comments, shares and clicks user posts.

Branded URL shorteners, such as foxchox.info/kpi means you can track clicks.

Look at direct competitors as benchmark ie. RockShox, a competitor, hasn’t posted on Facebook since 2010.

Also look at industry benchmarks(those who are not competitors but in same industry).  How do you compare?

Mobile interaction is where it is at, but Facebook falls short – on Facebook mobile you can’t share, only like or comment.

From the Q&A:

If your market area isn’t sexy… if you are selling life insurance, don’t focus on insurance, focus on life.  Not every brand is sexy, so what can you talk to people about that isn’t the brand, but will end up attracting people to the brand?

What to do when marketing department is begging for likes?  If you aren’t a brand, start to look at buying for ads to get those likes.  Also look at benchmarking and see where your competitors are at.  Then ask why do you need more likes?  Is it only because a bigger number looks cooler?

For marketing special offers on Facebook, people like specific dollar value off as opposed to % off.  There is a much higher engagement rate when it is $X off instead of X% off.

When it comes to both Facebook and Twitter, share with both audiences.  But also see if you have different audiences each place and customize for each.

Q&A Moderator: Noran El-Shinnawy, Director of Marketing, BoostCTR (@noranshinnawy)

Speakers:

Addie Conner, VP, Advertising, SocialCode (@socialcodeinc)
Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing, Marin Software (@marinsoftware)
Will Scott, President, Search Influence (@w2scott)
Marty Weintraub, CEO, aimClear (@aimclear)

First up is Matt from Marin Software.  He says consumers exposed to a brands social media are 50% more likely to click on paid search ads.  He also recommends the white paper ”The Influenced: Social Media, search and the interplay of consideration and consumption” by Group M for more metrics.

He advises to expand to fans of related brands and competitors.

Use keyword stemmping to find interests.  For example, type “camping i” and see what Facebook suggests.  Then do it for every letter of the alphabet following your main keyword.

Micro-segment your audience to keep cost down and get the most targeted audience.  Finely tuned segments allow you to shift spend to audiences that perform, increasing conversion and ROI.

Test images before copy.  Draw attention to ads with contrasting colors, and try to avoid blues because it is too similar to the Facebook color scheme.   Link images to audience to increase relevance:  use people’s faces and when all else fails, test pictures of cute puppies (LOL!)

Keep ads fresh: finely targeted audience x 4 hours/week on Facebook = ad blindness.  When your ad starts suffering from ad blindness, Facebook will reduce your ad inmpressions since it is less likely people will click on it.  Rotate ads every 2-3 days or as impressions drop, as you want to maintain your impression volume with an increase ctr and lower cost per like.

Maintain the facebook experience and integrate social experience on your site.

Next is Addie Conner

Think beyond the “like”-  optimizing towards facebook’s edgerank algorithm and fan value.

Sponsored like ads and inline fan ads are the most cost efficient advertising and have the highest engagement rates. Sponsored story units have the highest CTR but no control over them.

Next is Will Scott   from Search Influence

They ran a campaign for 7 days in January – overall it was a $o.17 cost per fan. with a 0.6% CTR on ads.

Clicks are expensive but impressions are cheap, likes are cheap.

Marty Weintraub @aimclear is next.

Target people based on where they work, and target people with really freaky interests – he showed all kinds of crazy interests people have that you can target with your advertising.

With sponsored stories, target the friends of your friends.

During the Q&A, Addie Xonners said Facebook is trying to make their ads not look like ads.

Some other tips given include: don’t write one ad, write many. Images must pop, adjust contrast to make it pop if you can. Don’t ask  people to buy your product, ask them to like you instead.  Focus on copy and consider rotating ads as extremely important.

Moderator: Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor, Search Engine Land (@elisabethos)

Q&A Moderator: Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com

Speakers: Drew Conrad, Social Media Marketing Specialist, ZAGG (@drewconrad )
Carrie Gouldin, Web Community Manager, ThinkGeek
Chris Silver Smith, President, Argent Media (@si1very)

Chris Silver Smith was up first, and he starts with a bang by telling the audience to get a jump start on a new twitter account by buying Twitter followers.  Followers are low quality, but you get 1000 followers for only $47 through BoostTwitterFollowers.com.

He then says you can develop more followers rapidly by following those people who auto-follow back.  Some of the tools he uses are SocialOomph to return followers easily and Twellow to see which of the people he follows also follow him back.  He also suggests searching twitter to find similar Twitter users, particularly those who follow and engage with people on Twitter, as well as searching for topic areas to find out those who are tweeting in that particular market area.

He says it is important to not just merely broadcast.  Retweet generously, look frequently for those with similar twitter accounts and topics to follow, post news of interest to your followers.  Make sure you are curating content your followers will find interesting, as well as posting tweets that are likely to get retweeted.

He also talks about using specialized characters in twitter posts, something I do not see happening very frequently.  Special characters are lucky charms for twitter, and you can find many of them here: http://www.semclubhouse.com/special-characters-for-twitter

Chris also uses tools which automate the process and make best use of timing for maximum impact tweets.  He uses SocialOomph to schedule future tweets, Timely by Demand Force which will determine the best time slots for your tweets, after analyzing your previous 199 tweets.  Dlvr.it is another tool he uses which organizes distribution across multiple social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

He suggests looking at ways to segment your accounts to reach all your audience.  He brings up Weather Underground, and how they created multiple weather accounts for specific cities and geographical location, since most people in San Jose likely would not be interested in following weather updates from Miami.

He also touches on developing things like widgets which can gain popularity and in turn drive links and retweets.  And he talks about how “daily quote” type feeds can get a high number of followers, but you need to determine how you can also market your site with it.

Next up is Carrie Gouldin from ThinkGeek, which was probably the best presentation I have seen at the conference so far this week.  She came with a ton of data and metrics for how ThinkGeek approaches Twitter for marketing.

ThinkGeek uses the approach storytelling vs spam, with their focus on best customers/followers.  They have decided that if they follow you, they already like you, so they use Twitter as a platform to build community and trust rather than strictly a marketing sales.  They also created two Twitter streams – a main one, which is also used for customer service, and a spam one that is strictly product promotion.

ThinkGeek focuses on engagement and things that are interesting and likely to be retweeted… they had 140,000 retweets in 3 month period.

When looking at their ROI, they measure retweets,  mentions and replies with cotweet;  link clicks using  bitly;  image views using twitpic; then analytics for site visits and conversion.

She brings up a very interesting metric, that 81% of users follow less than 100 people.

Thinkgeek tweets once per hour, and they determined their peak hours are between 12-2pm EST, so they tailor content around those times.   50% of thinkgeeks retweets happen between 9am-1pm EST.

She looks at Thinkgeek’s top 10 retweets and discovered the following: 113  average character length, which gives room for people to add an editorial comment to the retweet.  7 were text only tweets.  Day and time was significant with 7 tweeted betwen 9am-12 es.  Only 3 links were not tied to the specific date.  And finally, 2 were skynet jokes

Test a tweet at two different times of day, when does it get the most clicks/retweets.  Try tweeting photos with twitpic and attribution rather than a link.  Also try different kinds of content – text only, images, video, etc

When linking to a video, particularly if it is a long one and the funny part is in the last 30 seconds, link directly to good part.

Consider dressing up your icon for different events – ThinkGeek has a ton of different monkey icons dressed up differently for various events.

It is important not to go overboard on hashtags.

Next up is Zagg.com

Consider doing discounts and offers with an end time, such as  “invalid after 20 uses” or ”offer ends soon”

Zagg did giveaways and giftcards, once per week, with things like ”guess the typing speed”.

Zagg looked at what they tweeted, and it breaks down:

Segmented content: blogs 74%, offers 7%, zagg news 14%, giveaway 4%

But the interesring thing is when they looked at what drove the actual revenue: blog 56%, offers 29%, zagg news 7%, giveaways 8%

They did a Black Friday promotion where they were giving away an ipad an hour.  People woulod get an entry for submitting email address, then also got entries for sharing on Twitter and on Facebook.  They changed what was shared every hour so it wasn’t always the same thing, and it enabled them to drive traffic to various parts of the site.  They also were able to to expose different products to people. The end result?  585,000 visits to Zagg;  114% increase in revenue from previous Black Friday;  Twitter was #2 referrer (Facebook #1), bringing in 11% of referrals.  They also made trending topics in various locations. Also interesting is that their Klout score jumped from 55 to 77 in a day

From the Q&A

Zagg set up @zaggchick who responds to all customer service issues sent to main @zagg acct.

Carrie from ThinkGeek does 30% of her time on Twitter, spending about 3 hours per day.  They never auto tweet but tweet content as it happens online. She tweets between 9am-7pm only.  They dont tweet at odd hours, she turns off twitter when leaves work.  She doesnt have a personal twitter acct, which I found interesting.

sel – best shortening services for seo article

Zagg is very ROI oriented and use Google Analytics to track Twitter conversions.

A Facebook fan is more valuable than a Twitter follower.  And Carrie from ThinkGeek says not as much time spent on customer service on Facebook compared to Twitter. sThey also see a lot of inbound traffic from Facebook comment system used on the site.

Bryson Meunier, Director, Content Solutions, Resolution Media (@brysonmeunier)

Mark Munroe, Senior Director, SEO, Reply!, Inc (@markemunroe)

Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book

Tony Wright, CEO, WrightIMC (@tonynwright)

First up was Aaron Wall.

He looked back at how brands have been handled over the years.  He commented there are many ways to detect brand, such as search behaviour (both search volume & CTR), how frequently user’s hit the back button after visiting the site/page, repeat visitors, and query chains.

Bryson Menier was next. 

He commented how Google is becoming its own content source, with their sites such as YouTube, Google+. Google Books, Google Places, flight serch, Android marketplace.

He said smaller brands have it a lot easier when it comes to reacting to changes.  Smaller brands can move a lot faster on needed changes, compared to most larger brands.  Affiliates and small business can compete with the big brands, but should focus on building brand.Big Brands are not always winning – dont get complacent – staff aprropriately – use words ppl are searching for

He also said no one in this room would have a job if it was’t for Google, which is probably true for many of us.

Next up was Mark Monroe. 

He said brand advantages means a marketing advantage, link/citation advantage and a behavior advantage.  Users tend to click more on sites they know.  If people don’t know who you are, you don’t have the brand click advantage.

He brought up an example of two forums, one with brand advantage while the other did not, both using the same forum software.  Brand A was not a brand and had 4 million uniqiues.  Site B, which was a brand, had 2 million uniques.  But the interesting look on bounce rates and page views showed that Site A had a 82% Google bounce rate with an average of 1. page views per site.  Site B, the brand site, only had a Google bounce rate of 56% with an average 4.6 page views per visit.  However, the site B advantage was almost entirely do to repeat visitors.  Look at it from only first time visitors, and suddently both sites had nearly identical page views and Google bounce rate.  It does show how brand can affect how loyal people tend to be to their brands.

If you are not a brand, you have to be that much more for potential visitors  because you don’t have prior engagement with those visitors.  Every search is a question, so make sure if google offers your site as an answer, that you are actualy answering it. His example is how to fix a flat tire on your bike.  First result gave step by step instructions on how to fix a bike flat.  However, another result, with the same title tage was actually not even how to fix a flat, but instead said “the best way fix a flat tire is to not get one in the first place.  here are products…”  This is a bad user experience because the promise of the title wasn’t actually answered for the visitor.  So make sure your page delivers what the title promises.

He also talks about review sites, something which got hit with Panda.  Review sites with zero reviews on the page are not a good user experience, and have a high bounce rate as people leave the site in search of one with real reviews available.

Testing metrics is very important.  You want to track bounce rate, user engagement, page views and what is actually getting clicked.

Next up is Tony Wright  with “Turning Brand Awareness into SEO Success”

Fact: companies with high brand awreness tend to rank for more keyword terms and get more traffic from Google. Google may or may not favor brands inentionally:  Brand awareness doesn’t automatically equal google success, but algorithmically it should.

The average consumer mentions speciifc brands over 90 times per week in convos with friends, family and coworkers – John Moore, WOMMA, 2010

Companies with brand awareness think differently than those without brand awarenss.  SEO is usually not a priority,  most have baclink profiles others would kill for.  However, on page changes are extremely slow to occur – its not the decision makers money, in most cases.  He mentioned an example of a client of his whose IT dept explained they cannot do any 301 redirects.  Another exanple is it took 2 years to get meta tags changed on airline site, with the client citing “page load speed” as why it couldn’t happen… and by the time it did, meta tags were no longer as important.

Look at who your influencers are: the move to customer service based social media is strong and will have seo dividends because even the most jaded influencer loves to hear from the perceived brand leaders.  Influencers can make or break rankings for a single term, sometimes single handedly.

Dont be the logo police, you have to understand the difference between protecting your brand and alienating your online audience.  You should never let a good logo or copyright get in the way of a good viral experience. He brings up the example of an arline going after boy scouts who used logo for flights to their jamboree.

Google stated that language can be imprecise when it comes to search queries, so they use personalization to fill in the needed gaps.  They take into account context of the searcher, whether it be geographical information or language context from previous searches.  They also handle personalization with preference, such as weighting certain results higher because it is a site you frequent regularly and Google has been able to determine that particular site is a favorite of yours.

Google also hit on how personlization has to be done in a privacy-sensitive way, with transparency, and with user control.

He brought up some examples of how geography can play a big part in how Google returns customized results.  For example, a user searching for taxes on google.com would ge the IRS as the top result, while someone searching on Google.co.uk would get HM Revenue and Customs as the first result.  Localization also plays a big part in queries such as bus schedules, showing very location specific results depending on whether the user is searching from Boston, New York or Mountain View.

For a shopping example, after the user searches for lawn mowers, then searches for Amazon, after the initial generic Amazon search results, then the next result are Amazon product pages for lawn mowers.

Google also uses favorite and frequently visited sites as an influencer while searching.  Most people who search for “dominion” would get the power company, while someone who does searches related to domionion a card game, would see those game related sites as their top results instead of the power company.  Similarly, if someone frequents a particular site in a certain area, even if it is a less popular option for people doing the same search, the user would see that site as the number one result while others would see it much lower in the results.

Jack also stressed how important it is to have relevant information on your site when it is a bricks and mortar business.  Make sure you have address, hours and telephone number on the site, and in text on the page, and not in a fancy image instead.  Make sure you have claimed your Google Place listing as well, and that all the information they have is indeed correct.  This information is all used when potential visitors do searches.

Next up was Rangan Majumder from Bing.  He commented that Bing uses “ranker magic” to determine what results the uses would see when performing searches.

Bing looks as personalization both long term and short term – who are you as a user, as well as what you are trying to do right now.  He also stresses how important privacy and transparency is, and to never abuse a user’s trust.

Bing’s new SEO formula: Rank = Authority + Quality of Keyword Match + Personal Preference + Social Preference

You can change your Bing location in order to see localized search results not just based on your current location but to switch it to other locations where you may be temporarily or in the future.  Another exanple of how localization affects search is someone searching for 98.5 would see the specific search result for their local 98.5 radio station.

Bing also uses personalized nav queries in order to customize search results for some users.  For example, a heavy Yahoo mail user would see mail.yahoo.com as the first search result while most people would see the general Yahoo.com search result instead.

Authority is no longer just link authority, but social authority too.

Bing said users no longer have to settle for what’s best for the average and can get what’s best for them, which is pretty similar to Google.

Search engines aso have to look at how to balance previous searches/purchases – Danny Sullivan mentionedbuying baby safety doorknob lock for a science experiement, now sees baby stuff everywhere.  I have also seen the same, which becomes more apparent when I was helping someone find something online, and now I see that influence when I search now.

Google tries to balance local intent with global popularity.   Buying shoes in a store versus buying from someone who will mail them.  Mom and pops have an easier time ranking because of physical location.  However, one could argue they don’t have the brand awareness of a global brand.

But many bloggers struggle with determining whether they should outsource some of the more tedious blog chores or struggle and do it themselves.  So how do you decide whether you should tackle upgrading WordPress yourself or designing a custom template for your blog?  Here are some things to consider before you break out your online checkbook – or close it up if you tend to open it too freely!

Revenue
First off, does your blog earn any revenue?  If it does, this often makes it a much easier decision if you decide to hire a company to design a custom template or to design a logo for your blog.  When you look at your blog’s expenses versus revenue, you might decide to set apart part of the earnings from the blog to offset anything you’d like to spend money on.  It is much easier to spend $200 on a killer custom blog design when your blog made $400 last month than it is if your blog only made $5 last month.

Pain factor
If it takes you a full day to do a simple upgrade on WordPress, you may decide it is worth the cost of paying someone to do the full backup and upgrade it for you, that way you free up that day to do something else much more productive.  Regardless of what blog platform you use, there are people who do the backups and upgrades for a small fee.

Enjoyment
Plain and simple, some people enjoy doing things like working on their blog template or finding and trying out new plugins, the same tasks that other bloggers find tedious and annoying.  If you can happily spend an entire day trying out some new plugins or designing and tweaking a theme, then why would you want to take that away from yourself?  If you love to do it, don’t think you “have” to outsource it unless there is a reason for you to do it.

Moderators
Moderators just aren’t for forums.  If you have a popular blog with lots of comments, especially if you tend to post many posts each day, it can take up a huge amount of time to moderate comments.  While smaller blogs don’t have much problem with trolls and spam, if you have a large and popular blog, you probably have to moderate all comments instead of using the “only moderate first time commenters” setting, even when you have a spam filter such as Akismet in place.  You can hire a trusted moderator (consider regular commenters or people in the industry you are close to) to deal with the moderating and then he or she can raise any issue to your attention as needed.  Since this can easily be one of the most time consuming everyday blog chores, it can be valuable to outsource this to someone you know and trust.  And yes, trust is a big thing, you don’t want to hire someone to approve and moderate your blog only to discover they have been sneaking in links to their personal viagra or adult site on the sly!

Research
If your blog deals with a subject that requires you to keep on top of news in the industry, you could consider outsourcing some of the research, such as artices online and blogs discussing the topic.  Then you have all the information at your fingertips when you go to write it.  Some areas have huge amounts of news and updates that even someone doing it full time can have trouble keeping up.  Hire someone who can weed out the duplicate stories and give you the best of the best and the most unique stories and points of view that you can then comment on or link to.

Content
What about the content, can you outsource any of that?  First, if your voice and/or persona is the draw on your website, you probably want to be careful how you approach this.  For you, guest blogging is the way to go, where you hand pick either authors or entries and showcase them as guest bloggers.  But if you are writing on something where it could be Joe Webmaster writing about it, such as your blog on Golden Retrievers, then you can more easily get away with outsourcing your content.  But you first want to ensure you are getting quality, coherent copy - while outsourcing to India might be cheap, you don’t always get the quality you are looking for.  And also, probbaly the most important, you want to make sure whoever writes anything for you isn’t just copying from someone else’s site or blog!

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide where the balance is between doing it yourself and the cost of getting someone to do it for you.  If your blog is a money maker, that decision is made much easier, since it won’t cost you more than you earn to do so.

Titles
When I look at older content sites, some of the titles are seriously atrocious.  Often times they are either so keyword rich they reek of spam, or they are written with nary a keyword in site, or if you are lucky, one keyword right at the end.   So have a look at each title and see if you can rewrite it to include keywords without being spammy, as well as creating strong titles and will get the clicks.  And yes, I am especially talking to those people who still have content where all their articles have the same “Sitename.com Site Name” title tag

Linking within the content
are there opportunities for you to link to other articles on your site from within each article?  If you can, great.  But be careful not to go overboard, if you have something linked on every sentence, it will look a little odd.

Linking externally
Going back through old content can present opportunities to link to outside authoritative sites within your market area.  Don’t be afraid to link out when those links can provide value to your readers, as well as the possibility of a potential link back from those sites too.

Checking current links
It wouldn’t be the first time someone has discovered that great link you added to an article 3-4 years ago now leads to a porn spam portal.  So be sure to give your current links a health check to make sure none of them are leading to “bad neighborhoods” or other sites you really do not want your readers to think you are endorsing!

Giving new keywords a boost
There are probably new keywords and keyword phrases you have discovered are valuable since you originally wrote some of your content.  See if there are new keywords and phrases that can be worked into content about the topic, so you can give an extra boost to those keywords on your site.  Especially if you aren’t a big writer, this can be a great way to get some of those new keywords without having to write entirely new content.

Related posts
If your older content is on a WordPress blog, there are many different “related posts” plugins you can use.  Otherwise, start with your most viewed articles and eventually work your way so that every article on your site has related posts or articles listen at the end.  It will not only help with deep linking but it will also be great for user experience and increase page views on your site as well.

Fix typos
I am quite certain I have pages out there with typos, and every once in a while I will spend some time going through old articles and checking for spelling errors and typos.  While once upon a time typos and misspellings could be considered a viable SEO strategy, nowadays – particularly with Google’s new “did you mean” correction in the search results – it won’t pay off as well now as it once did.  And it doesn’t hurt to check grammar while you are at it too.

Outdated content
If you have content that is outdated, take the time to update it, especially if new information arises… you want people who are looking for that new information to be able to find it, especially if you aren’t planning to write a new article about it for your site.  That way when people search for it, you will have it, whether they search through a search engine or your internal site search.

So next time you have a couple hours to spare, sit down and start looking at your older content and see how you can give them an SEO audit and fix what needs fixing.  Just be sure to keep track of which pages you have done, so that next time you sit down, you won’t have to try and remember what you have done and what still is awaiting the SEO audit.

So if you have employees building up their profiles during company time, have you considered what happens to those profiles when that employee leaves?  What if that employee goes to work for a competitor?  Or starts a competing business?  The last thing you want is to not only have them taking an immense user base with them, but then having to start all over again from scratch at your own company, even though you effectively paid those former employees to create and promote all those accounts while on the clock. 

And worse, those former employers could completely sabotage your social media efforts by talking a trash about you and your company, or telling all your social media success tactics to the audience made up of those who follow him or her because they were employed by you… and yes, that audience will not just include your clients and customers, but also your competitors too.

Employee contract
First, you want to make sure your employee hiring contract clearly states that any social media related accounts that any employee uses for company business remains with the company even if the employee leaves employment.  This is the first safeguard, and prevents any issues coming up later where an employee might try and claim they didn’t know their accounts were owned by the company and not themselves personally.  If it is included and signed by the employee, this position just became a lot harder for an employee to claim.

Create with company info
Make sure all accounts are initially created with the company’s email address and include the URL where applicable.  If things go south, it is much easier to go back and try and regain control of accounts if they were originally set up using name@companyname.com rather than employeename@gmail.com, even if said employee switches it later to a personal email address.

Include the company name in the accounts
This might seem like a no brainer for some, but it time and again I see companies getting their employees to Twitter without using any kind of name branding.  While obviously this won’t work in all cases, such as Stumble accounts you want to use to also Stumble your own company’s pages too.  But on Twitter, for example, it makes much more sense for your employee Scott to use CompanyNameScott as a Twitter handle than ScottJones.  This will also make it much easier to prove ownership.

Rules governing personal name use for business
Yes, some employees will legitimately use their personal social media accounts for the good of the company and many will never run into any problems with it.  But you want to consider the potential impact of those employees gaining too large of a following based on their employment by your company.  What if they get poached by the competition and start tweeting for their followers to start using the competition instead of you.  Or what if you are forced to fire that employee and he or she starts to talk smack about your company with their personal accounts that many of your clients/customers follow?

Pseudonyms
So when you need a “human name” like Scott Jones rather than CompanyNameScott, definitely consider using pseudonyms that your company registers and then hands over to employees.  You can even get individual employee’s input into their names, since you don’t want to inadvertently chose a name that is close to the same name as a childhood rival or an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s name.  Of course, also check the name in Google from a reputation standpoint.  But most importantly, using pseudonyms can be invaluable because if the employee who originated the various profiles and accounts leaves the company, you can have someone else slide into the persona and continue on with the marketing efforts without having to rebuild.  And using pseudonyms doesn’t have that potential grey area if employees use their real names.

As social media becomes more and more popular as a marketing tactic, I am sure there will be many cases where things like ownership of Twitter accounts and Facebook groups will end up in courts, and they are already being fought out in the support of various sites.  So when you start creating your company’s next excursion into social media marketing, consider these points before you make a mistake that could result in you having to rebuild all those profiles from scratch when an employee walks away with all your hard work.

What have you done to protect yourself and your company?  And yes, I have definitely heard horror stories of when employees go bad!