'Net Features : disqus

2013: Social SEO Required

Administrator — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:47:00 GMT

By Clayburn Griffin, Organic Search Director at Catalyst

Good SEOs can no longer ignore social. It may have been possible last year, while search engines were still experimenting with the incorporation of social signals into their algorithms, but in 2013, Social SEO is required.

The Web is an evolving system. The old system of using backlinks to determine authority and relevance by the search engines has become outdated. This was the system pioneered by Google, and while links are still important, search engines are realizing that social media has changed the very nature of the Internet.

Now people online engage with content and websites in a variety of ways that all tie back to their identity. Identity is the key to Social SEO. Search engines are giving people their own authority and relevance, just as they would a website, and the signals that a user gives to a piece of content pass the user’s authority and relevance to it. These signals tell search engines that a user, a specific user with certain interests and proficiencies, approves of pieces of content. These signals range from simple votes (likes, +1’s) to shares (tweets, posts) and even commenting. Search engines incorporate these social signals into their ranking algorithms.

Social SEO is about optimizing for these social signals in order to boost search engine rankings. To get you going in the right direction with your Social SEO initiatives, here are a few tips that will help to ensure your Social SEO strategy is successful.

Optimize Your Site for Engagement

You drive traffic to your website from several channels, but without engagement from these visitors, you’re missing the opportunity to enhance your authority. You can increase engagement by making it easy for them by including proper social sharing buttons. Don’t go with one of those catchall widgets that clutter your website and look tacky. Use the buttons that matter most, namely: Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and Google +1.

These buttons allow easy sharing and should be placed within or around the content that they’re meant to share. Don’t put these buttons in your header. People expect share buttons to be associated with the content they’re positioned around on a Web page. If you have a Like button in your header, then it may seem to be for your brand’s page or your homepage rather than the specific content being shared. And a single page that lists many pieces of content should include each piece’s associated share buttons in an intuitive way.

Facebook Like:

• Consider whether you should use Like or Recommend. Should you include Send?

• Set the proper Open Graph tags on each page so that the posts to Facebook contain the appropriate information. Always include a thumbnail image (e.g., the og:image tag to designate the specific image on the page).

Twitter Tweet:

• Set the tweet text. Use an engaging message that will describe the link and help get click-through from impressions.

• Use relevant hashtags. You can set the hashtag attribute to pre-populate the tweet with a hashtag. If your content is relevant to a popular hashtag, include it to help every tweet get more exposure and add more relevancy to the link being tweeted.

• Identify yourself as the author (via). After the tweet, users are suggested to follow the Twitter handle. So, help them connect with you when they share your content.

• To make a secondary suggestion, fill out the Related attribute. This account will be suggested alongside the author recommendation. Commenting is also important to engagement. Make it easy for users to comment on your content without the need to log in. If you include a login feature as well, provide multiple options. Disqus is a particularly good commenting system and is a social network of its own in a sense.

Use Google+

Don’t neglect Google+. While the activity numbers may not be as impressive as Facebook’s, it has a far greater impact on search results. Whether people actively use Google+ or not, many are performing searches while logged into their Google account (and in many cases this is also their Google+ account). Organic traffic from the (not provided) keyword has been increasing substantially recently, and this traffic is from people signed into Google when performing a search.

So, even if they aren’t posting to Google+, their search results will be affected and their social connections will have a big influence on those results. That means the people who are using Google+ regularly have considerable power to shift rankings.

Make sure you’re on Google+ connecting with people and sharing your content. Gain additional exposure for your brand by contributing in relevant Google+ Communities, as well.

Empower Your Employees

Having a social media policy that encourages employees to be active in social media can help create many brand evangelists on the Web for you. In addition, key members of your organization may be in a good position to lend major credibility and authority to your Social SEO campaign.

Provide a list of your social media profiles so that employees are able to find them easily. On occasion send out a company email to promote new content on your website and ask employees to share it via their social media accounts.

Read More

For a more in-depth analysis of Social SEO, you can read Catalyst’s newly published ebook “Social SEO Strategies: Mastering the Art of Social SEO.” The publication explains the nuts and bolts of Social SEO, as well as provides a roadmap for campaign set-up, strategy development, execution tactics, tools, automation and performance metrics. The complimentary eBook (PDF format) is available on the Catalyst website at:

By Clayburn Griffin

Clayburn Griffin is an Organic Search Director at Catalyst, a pioneer in strategic digital marketing services for Fortune 1000 brands. Catalyst’s services include: SEO, paid search marketing, social SEO, content strategy, digital asset optimization, e-retail optimization, and more.

Pseudonyms and Social Profiles

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Do you use your real name when you post comments on the Web? According to some recent data released by Disqus, the answer is a resounding no.

Disqus, a platform for online commenting communities, found that the most important contributors online are those using pseudonyms because they tend to contribute the highest quantity and quality of comments. In fact, those using pseudonyms actually account for 61 percent of all comments and commented more frequently - 6.5 times more frequently than anonymous comments and 4.7 times more frequently than commenters using their real names (via Facebook).

Disqus qualified quantity as both the aggregate number of comments and average number of comments by each identity. In relation to quality, the platform broke it down into positive and negative signals. Positive signals were defined as the number of times a comment is liked or replied to, while negative signals were the number of times a comment is flagged, marked as spam or deleted.

There are some legitimate reasons for using a pseudonym, outside of privacy. Namely, should the site being commented on not use nofollow tags, you'll build some relevant links courtesy of the anchor text used with your pseudonym.

Plug Into Better Commenting With Intense Debate

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Are you using a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad? Third-party commenting solution Intense Debate announced the release of several plugins for its service which may help you leverage the power of commenting on your Web property.

If you're not familiar with Intense Debate and services like it (such as Disqus), it is a service for bloggers to "enhance and encourage" the conversation occurring on your blog or website through features like comment threading, or reply by email. Other features like commenter profiles, RSS readers and tracking, widgets, moderation/blacklisting, reputation points and comment voting, and even a simple Twitter integration make this type of service a must-have for serious, social-networking focused websites.

Plugins for Polldaddy (another Automattic company - which also owns WordPress) for embedded polls, Seesmic and YouTube (for displaying videos in blog comments) are available now. Thanks to a recently published API, expect that developers will be pushing out plugins to users of the very active commenting network.

Current users of IntenseDebate need to just log in to their dashboard to see a list of current plugins. Activating a plugin from the account requires you simply select "Activate" next to the plugin in your account. Users will see a comments section on their blog and a plugin icon at the top right of the comment box. To use the plugin, just select the icon - that's it!

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WordPress Gets Threaded Comments

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:32:00 GMT

Another release of WordPress (version 2.7) is expected to be released this week. The big development is the addition of threaded comments. Threaded, or nested comments, are a way of displaying comments that allow visitors to reply to a previous viewer's comment as well as your blog post itself. The advantage of using threaded comments (one solution is the popular Disqus platform) is the increased/enhanced sense of community such an offering provides.

It is important to note that if you choose to upgrade to version 2.7 of WordPress, you do not have to add threaded comments support to your theme. So if you are already using Disqus or another threaded comment plugin, you can continue to use it without any problem. The issue with built-in threaded comment support is that many of the themes currently in use do not support threaded comments, so there will be a little tweaking neccessary to get it working properly.