It finally hit me a day later, as I am slow to recognize such things. There was a distinct lack of authenticity lurking in the well-intentioned reasoning behind the group. The one thing social media does exceptionally well is give people a place to broadcast in their own voice, clearly. It doesn’t matter if you’re a shrieking Bieberite or a science fiction author renowned for their foresight – your voice is your voice. When you start trading that voice for favors, you start to lose what makes you different from the rest.

I approach Twitter very differently from many people, I know. I’m careful about who follows me, tagging spammers and blocking accounts that are following more than 1,000 other people, even if they’re in my “space,” as it were. I seek authenticity in every bit of engagement, positive or negative and when I link to something on Twitter or Facebook, it’s because I find some inherent value to it as part of the ongoing discussion.

I don’t ask for retweets, I don’t participate in Follow Friday, I don’t even do that thing where you put a period in front of your @ response so people see me thanking someone they don’t follow for liking what I do. These things have all become eroded as pieces of social media capital, static that overwhelms signal. I’d hate to lose what little cachet I have with my audience by doing what everyone else does. If I follow someone, it’s because I’m interested in what they have to say, not because I’m hoping for a follow back. If someone follows me, I hope it’s because they are interested in what I have to say.

All you have in social media is your voice. If you sell it out for the sake of a little short-term boost, what are the long-term consequences?

“Writing often designed to appeal more to search engines?” “Packing stories with words?” Arrgg! Give me a break! Talk about old school. Keyword density has not been a valid measure of SEO copywriting success in probably 8-10 years now.

• Do you need to include keyphrases in your copy? Yes.
• Do you need to “pack” your copy with keywords? No.
• Does your content need to appeal more to search engines than people. Absolutely not!

I’ve mentioned before how I’ve found that my clients have gotten better results, both search engine and conversion-wise, by appealing to people. Natural, propulsive writing that engages the audience is more likely to bring in and grab visitors, encourage linking and give the search engines fewer negative strikes, particularly when it comes to overdensity against you.

While not every company can offer a multitude of newsletters and the like to their customers through email blasts, you should ask yourself if there’s a way you can place the experience more firmly in their grasp by offering choices when possible. Do you do a daily email but not offer a digest version that condenses the week’s headlines for your business? Are you able give your customer the ability to opt-in for specifically the products they are interested in? Allowing clients to tailor your outreach for you ensures that their interests and/or needs will be met more effectively.

(For the record, I switched over to just the digital product emails because Boomkat is located in the UK and shipping costs are just plain murder.)

When seven blogs that are giving your music away for free occupy the front page of the google results for your album and your own shop doesn’t even appear, you are losing money, Moon Wiring Club. Income from recordings is at a premium (and MWC is a studio-based act that doesn’t tour, so it’s even more important for them) and the need to make it easy for people to find your goods and give you money is pressing, to say the least. Taking the time to construct a decent shop with clear copy and good metatags and making sure it’s linked clearly from every page on your site gives both the search engines and regular visitors a clear way to reward you for your work.

(This is without going into the fact that Moon Wiring Club’s site doesn’t feature their name in the domain.)

Seriously, if you’re going to auto-tweet a banal marketing message, at least use proper grammar and punctuation. Why are there quotation marks? Why do you use “U” instead of “You?” Why do you want to look like base incompetence is the standard at your corporation?

(Having eaten there, I can actually answer the third question…)

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While this increases your raw keyword count and accompanying density, Google and the other search engines look at more than that when determining the quality of information presented.  Headers need to provide structure to your readers, to show them content that is sorted from most important to least important in regards to the page’s topic.  You should also look at headers as a way to place keywords relevant to your topic in the appropriate order.  A better example would go as follows:

Red Widgets For Sale

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Search engine spiders will see that this page provides authoritative text on the topic of buying red widgets, even as I’ve conveniently arranged them by their (completely theoretical) search volume that matches the (completely theoretical) order of relevance.  Of course, if a term like “red widget financing” had a massive amount of volume, it could well get its own page that would then be ordered by headers in the same fashion.

This goes back to a central point that’s frequently missed in discussions about SEO: the reader should come first.  What’s the point of getting someone to a page if they see just keyword-packed text with no thought applied to its flow? The more relevant information that you provide to your customers, the more likely they are to view your site as a resource, even if they don’t purchase on their first visit.

Google’s updated their design for search results quite nicely, taking a bit of what I like about Bing’s left-side menubar and making it more minimal and friendly. I found myself looking at the descriptions under the titles a bit more in this iteration, but that’s what an attorney would call purely anecdotal evidence, I’m sure.

Better go make sure your retail operation’s information is up to date in Google, because Google Maps is now including local businesses in their maps’ Street Views.  It looks to be a very dynamic system and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we saw it integrating Yelp! and the ever-popular-on-Twitter Foursquare.  Check it out on the Google Maps blog!

First of all, let’s talk about Data Devices International.  They’re a respected vendor of security products like degaussers, hard drive destroyers, hard drive erasers, etcetera.  They had Degausser.com redirecting to their main homepage and I sat down with them and came up with a strategy to maximize this URL by creating a resource for the data security business.  Hence, the new Degausser.com was born, offering information about degaussers, including how they work, different types of degaussers, and information about NSA-approved devices.

Then there’s Housewall.  They offer garage organization and storage solutions that let you get your garage back.  Working with the people at Blue Agate, we restructured the site with new URLs, better on-page content, metatags, and directory placement that led to a dramatic improvement in their performance, moving them up in the rankings in a highly-competitive field, particularly when it comes to localized search.  There’s still more work to be done by their team, but they’ve got a very solid foundation for improved rankings in the future.

These are just two examples of how we’ve helped smaller businesses get more traction out of their web presence.  Unfortunately, our three largest clients have us bound to confidentiality agreements, so we can’t go into details on those, but in the next few weeks, I’m going to try to make some posts that talk about how we’ve helped them without naming names.