Social Media & Blog Consultant

Some businesses are on Facebook and Twitter but don’t really know why. Others haven’t taken the leap and don’t see the point.

If you fall into either category, consider this: Social media content, including video, can potentially give your site a boost in search result rankings.

Twitter, Facebook, and SEO

Search engines are always looking for new ways to tweak their algorithms to combat spammers and deliver the freshest, most relevant results. In 2010, Google made over 500 changes to its algorithms alone.

Now consider how important social media networks are becoming–particularly Facebook, with about 750 million users, and Twitter, with approximately 200 million users. It only makes sense, then, that the search engines would begin to use data from social media networks as relevancy ranking factors. This is still an emerging trend with fits and starts. For instance, Google is trying to figure out how to play nicely with its competitor Facebook while Microsoft has figured out how to incorporate Facebook data into its Bing search results. At a minimum, experiments conducted by The Daily SEO Blog and others show that tweets with links can help push up the page being linked to in Google search results.

Where Blogs Come In

Often, one of the best ways to tap into this phenomenon is with a blog. A company blog is a fantastic way to loosen the tie, write from the heart, and create viral content that’s bound to attract links, which in turn helps with search engine rankings. Then you take it a step further by publicizing the blog post with an interesting tweet or Facebook Page post, which in turn gets retweeted on Twitter or shared on Facebook.

YouTube is Great for SEO, Too

Web surfers love video. And Google, which owns YouTube, tends to push popular, relevant YouTube videos high up in search results. A quality YouTube video that’s relevant and keyword-optimized gives your company another shot at ranking in search results.

How I Can Help You

* Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ Consulting and Content. I’ll help you define or refine your social media presence and write compelling updates designed to get attention. I’ve worked behind the scenes with several well-known companies and small businesses alike, writing their Facebook status updates and tweets and optimizing their social media profiles with important keywords.

* Blog Consulting and Content. As an award-winning blogger, I can also help with your blog. I’ll work with you to develop a distinctive voice and style, create an editorial calendar built around hot keywords and trending topics, and write the posts.

Here are a few blog post ideas I pitched to and wrote for the Cisco Platform blog, each of which received thousands of views:

Volcano Fallout: Cisco TelePresence Helps Businesses Keep Moving

Top Tech Tips: 10 Ways to Produce a High-Impact Webinar

Survey Says: 66% of Businesses Plan to Increase Their Use of Telepresence

For more about my own blogging, see my Writer page on this site.

* YouTube. I’m no Hitchcock, but I can capture and edit informal YouTube-style video to enhance your blog posts or even develop a dedicated YouTube channel for your business. Here are a few examples of my YouTube videos:

For the Cisco Platform blog – Cisco HealthPresence Telemedicine Mobile Clinic on a Roll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSFbt-CNwKU&feature=player_embedded

For Harmony Ridge Lodge, a pet-friendly California inn – Dog Does Yoga, Drives a Car!

For my Traveler 2.0 blog, a video about an Internet-connected hotel room chair – Latest Hotel Room Amenity: An Electric Chair

Give me a call at (415) 742-2022 to find out how I can help you increase your Google rankings and attract targeted traffic to your site through social media, blogging, and video.