Connie Bensen

Last week in San Francisco I visited the offices of a company that had proudly launched their blog the previous day. They asked for feedback and as a Community Manager my first impulse is: ‘How can I help you?’. Here is my advice for them & all of you bravely venturing into this world.

First, I am not an expert on SEO but I have been successful. I invested a considerable amount of time reading up on it when I started blogging. And I never do anything part way! So how good is the search engine optimization on my blog? Google ‘community manager’ and see what you get:

What does this mean (ie: why should you care?):

1. Today I rank #1 for searching in Google for ‘community manager’. (I finally rank higher than my friend, Jeremiah Owyang, who rightfully deserves high regard for his Four Tenets article.) Yes, this is a competitive sport.

2. The organizer of Community 2.0 reached out to me to speak because she Googled ‘Community Manager’

3. My present client Googled ‘social media community manager Minnesota’ and found me. Yes, I also live in Minnesota (And yes, I do consult on special projects)

Be forewarned that SEO (search engine optimization) is addictive.

But the payback is that a blog can greatly increase a site’s presence in the eyes of search engines. What does this mean? 

1. People who are looking for your topic can find you.

2. You don’t need to buy Google Ad’s for your site or advertise it.

3. It gives you presence as a leader in the niche and increases your brand presence.

Let’s translate that into business goals:

1. Customers seeking your product/resource will find you

2. Little or no $$’s need to be spent on marketing and advertising

3. Establishes your brand as an industry leader providing information and increases your brand visibility

Most importantly, it’s gratifying to give back to the community that supports you (whether as an individual or as a company)

My sister is my webmaster and she’s done a great job with mine. You can find her at SolutionsByHeidi

Here are her 3 suggestions in terms of what she feels are important:

1. Sitemap – submit to Google & Yahoo so that it’s crawled immediately
2. AllinOne SEO – this is a very popular WordPress plugin (esential is probably more like it)
3. Metatags – choose ones that people search for and don’t have too many

Content – This takes time but writing about related topics on a consistent basis builds SEO quickly. For example, I put up my blog in Sept 2007 and focused on Community Management in Dec 2007.

There is no need to worry about keyword density. (If you don’t know what I mean by that – don’t worry about it, be happy!)

Note: If someone hands you a list of corporate keywords & tells you to use them… you need to have a talk with them. Here are my suggestions:

1. Review the keywords. Are they words that your customers use in their daily conversations? (If not, it’s no use to use them).
2. Use a monitoring tool like Techrigy SM2 to analyze conversations around your brand & industry to analyze the author tags to identify the best keywords to use. Here’s an example of a tag cloud for my niche of Community Manager from SM2. (Do the corporate SEO keywords need tweaking? oh my! See what I mean?)
3. Writing around corporate keywords comes off stilted. Just write naturally & the organic SEO will happen. I always appreciated that @ShashiB got that when I worked with him at Network Solutions.

More importantly, make sure that your titles have keywords related to your topic in them. For example I used to put up a weekly post called Community Strategist Links to reinforce my SEO for that phrase. I also have a redirect from http://communitystrategist.com so the URL helps with my SEO. (ie: purchase a URL related to your keywords if possible).

And search engines also see the first paragraph, so getting your terms in there is also useful. (Make your point as soon as possible). If you scroll back up I slid in ‘Community Manager’ in the first paragraph. For awhile I was on a bent of disliking ‘community manager’ so I was using community building & community strategist but I realized that I was doing myself a disservice in terms of SEO.

Utilize internal links within your site. If you wrote about a related topic then link back to it. Search engines like seeing the interrelationship within your site. In number 2 just above I linked to a previous post that shows an Author Tag Cloud that I was referring to.

Search Engines love back links

Link love – Link to other blogs in your niche. As bloggers we all like to have backlinks. That builds our own SEO. And when you link to us, then we’ll come over, read your post, comment and then in the future link to you. This will increase your SEO and it creates a lot of happiness in the community at large. Not sure where to find related bloggers? Use Technorati Search and search by those with High Authority. (It will introduce you to new friends in your topic area too!)

Blog Roll – These are another type of backlinks but they aren’t viewed as highly by search engines as backlinks in the content. Link to the blogs that you read and as time goes on others will link back to you. If you get to know a blogger, you can ask if you could mutually link to each other’s blogs but please develop a relationship before asking (otherwise it’s tacky – I delete so many emails about this… If you don’t know me, don’t spam me!).

Commenting on other people’s blogs – This is really important if you’re going to be a blogger. It’s as much about participation as it is about writing. So go forth and read other people’s blogs in your niche and comment. Leave meaningful comments. If you have written a post that adds value to your comment then add the link. I call these legacy links or breadcrumbs because they create a path back to your blog for readers in the future. It also contributes to your SEO because it’s another type of backlink. People love getting comments and if you expect them then give first and ye shall receive.

Measuring your progress

Google Analytics is the best place to watch your blog presence grow. You can see what keywords are helping people find your blog with. You can also see where your traffic is coming from (both physical source as well as blog url’s). Google has set up a self paced course at Conversion University.

Claim your blog on Technorati – this shows your Rank, Authority & the number of backlinks. You can track your progress. Some bloggers feel that Technorati no longer has as much relevance.

Finally, Google your topic area. Once you start getting on the top one to three pages it will serve as additional motivation.

For more reading: Darren Rowse has tons of resources (that’s where I learned much from!)

What are your suggestions for improving blog SEO?

Lee Odden, Albert Maruggi, Barry Judge, CMO at Best Buy & I had a conversation on Twitter one morning. Lee recently summarized it. Most of you are probably well aware that the organic SEO gained from community building & user generated content is quite powerful.

Lee says:

My opinion is that it would actually take extra effort to make community building work and not realize the positive effects for SEO.  Many search engine optimization consultants that engage social media channels have noticed how their efforts resulted in community building effects.  Building up profiles on various social media sites and participating in communities to share and promote content attract links, but it also builds trust. 

At the end of his article, Lee asks the following question:

My question for community managers is, are you leveraging any SEO keyword research and insight to assist word choice when building profiles, creating content and outreach online?

There seem to be two schools of thought on this:

1. Management that says – these are the corporate SEO keywords. Make sure that they are used in the content you create with a certain amount of frequency. (My opinion is that that results in jilted sounding content & doesn’t make for very authentic writing. Will your readers trust what you write?)
2. Use language that is natural to the audience when creating content. This is much easier to do & easier for the reader in my opinion.

Can you tell which is my preference? My concern is in regard to the corporate SEO keywords. Are they aligned with the language that the public uses? One of the things that community managers find themselves doing is translating corporate terminology into terms that people use & vice versa.

Techrigy (whom I work for) has a social media monitoring tool. I enjoy showing the Author Tag Cloud. It’s a compilation of the tags that people have assigned to the results found for a certain search. In other words the largest words are probably what people are searching for. If it’s your brand/product then they are good ideas for SEO keywords. There are two advantages:

1. they are generated by those interested in the brand/product
2. they will highlight new words/ideas/issues (how often do corporate keywords get reviewed to reflect new trends?)

This is the Author Tag cloud for my personal brand of ‘Connie Bensen’. You can make your own with our Freemium version.

Amongst the expected terms there is ‘Age of Conversation’ & it’s various formats including aoc, aoc2, etc. It’s a collaborative book that I contributed to which was headed up by Drew McLellan & Gavin Heaton (see their names?). 

So my question is – do you think that the community manager should be required to use SEO keywords as they create content? Or is it better to let them build organically?

For my blog I haven’t focused on specific keywords. And this will make many cringe but I don’t tag my blog posts (so none of my own blog posts are reflected in that chart!). And my Technorati rank maintains at around 12,600. And people find me thru Google…My suggestion is to have a broad mix & be consistent. Build community in a natural manner rather than a forced one & people will appreciate it.

For additional reading: I wrote Top 3 Metrics for Building Brand Online

How often should you evaluate & adjust your website?

This question was asked in the Web Strategy Facebook group. My answer was that all the time & ongoing. And why do I say this? Well if your website is static, then you may have what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as an ‘Irrelevant Website". Are you really paying attention to the needs of your customers?

In my new role I’m considering how a corporate site can be made more relevant. It’s a new challenge! My sister & I have had lots of practice with this since we opened our site in January. It has evolved so much as we’ve responded to our users. And our efforts have resulted in stats that show that 60% are return visitors. Our Technorati rank is under 100,000 which I consider an accomplishment because we’re in a specialized niche. I believe those two items indicate we have a community that’s interconnected to the community at large.

But here’s the deal: we have established an expectation to provide information, tech support & customer service at a high level, so we’ve decided to bring in another person. Ah, now there’s the challenge! We’ve had an internal wiki where we’ve collaborated, but it is growing all of a sudden! Communication & collaboration are going to be key.  So my sister has added a calendar and started setting up more pages to plan our projects. We are trying to get topics out of email. Our mini model gives me plenty to think about as I consider my larger project of working with my company’s website & consider possibilities for communication & collaboration. Jeremiah has a great post that offers more in-depth info on this topic.

My point is that I think that good web strategy practices can be applied to any size of website & SHOULD be! If you care about your customers, then you should be continually considering your customers, your interface & the level of service/products that you offer.

Last week I began my position with ACDSee as their Community Manager. I have so many ideas for engaging past, present & future customers. And now I’m excited to have the opportunity to join in making our website more relevant by adding educational aspects to it. I agree that the corporate website should be the source for purchasing, but I believe that it can be so much more!

Why I am I so excited about an educational focus?

It’s because ACDSee makes creative software and I believe that people need to see it dance. There is a saying that I’ve heard in various forms…

• Tell me.
• Show me.
• Let me try

Traditional marketing has the first one covered & we offer 30 day trials, so the third is covered, but the second one is what connects it all & makes the product useful & meaningful.

The ACDSee blog is a great venue for showcasing the capabilities in little bits. This photo is my favorite example showing the power of the tools (you have to admit it’s incredible!).

But my sister & I know that users prefer to serve themselves. We have spent a lot of time maximizing DigiScrapInfo.com in terms of usability. Our visitors have at least 3 paths to find information. We offer tutorials in many formats: html, pdf, & video. We’re considering offering the option to order them in a bound book because people refer to their printouts as the ACDSee bible. (We’re won’t use that name though).

What are your thoughts & ideas on this? What do you hope to find when you visit a product website?