Social Media and Real-Time News Releases Take Effort
For the last several months, chatter among web developers and those who specialize in SEO has been all about the effects of Google’s implementation of the Caffeine search models. Now that Google has implemented Caffeine, it is clear that the effects are all about being real time and popular “in the moment” and “in the news”. What does this mean? It means that in order for us to keep our websites in the top results, we are going to need to pay attention to many outside factors.
With the introduction of the Caffeine model, webmasters, bloggers, and especially companies and corporations, are going to need to pay attention to keeping themselves talked about by others. This means a regular stream of publishing, in various forms, as well as building a strong base of followers who will read and repeat that body of published works.
Now that we’ve successfully scared the hell out of you, let’s take a look at what all that publishing really means.
Fans on Facebook and Followers on Twitter
The best favor you can do for your website is to get connected with Facebook and Twitter. These two sites can be your best friends in the SEO business. You will be using your profiles to link to the content you create on your main website in order to bring traffic to your work, and to garner more attention from various SE bots. The more traffic, the better ranked your published works will be.
The idea here is to make sure that you and your content are being chatted about in Social Media and talked about on the News Wires. Since Google (and presumably others who will follow that lead) is now monitoring chatter on Social sites like Facebook and Twitter, it becomes apparent that being part of that chatter is key. To make the best of both sites, publish regular, meaningful, useful and unique articles on Facebook and tweets on Twitter.
News Releases and Weblogs (Blogs)
Following the theme of “what’s up to date?”, the Caffeine model includes employing the chatter found in the news and on blogs in calculating search relevance. Again, if you are being talked about then you are going to help your results. Getting found is the key, and driving traffic with regular releases and blog entries are the main factors to getting found under the Caffeine model.
There are several News Release websites that offer free news releases. Though this is certainly an option, and the content does get found by search engines, the free choices do not usually offer the best choice for SEO considerations. However, those same sites also offer extremely inexpensive choices that will allow you to optimize your releases. This is usually the best way to go, as even the most inexpensive selection will allow you to embed text links to your website and to include images and video to enhance the visibility of the release.
May PR sites offer channel publishing, which will further push your content into relevant streams. This can be very useful, for example, in businesses wanting to highlight travel segments or home furnishings. Essentially, any market where an established vertical segment exists. This is typically a more expensive publishing choice, but can be very helpful for those who are trying to penetrate busy markets with lots of competitors.
Lastly, it is worthwhile to consider hiring someone to create regular content and postings for you website. This can be anything from selecting the “Create My Press Release” button on a PR site, to a freelancer or full-time position. The value of having regular content published is going to be well worth the effort and expense [if it is important for you to be found].
But I’m Already in the Top Ten!
Good. But beware! Much of what Caffeine will do has yet to be realized. You and your competitors are just now learning of these new SE ranking factors. Nobody has really done much about it. However, it would be a big mistake to assume that things will stay as they are, or to take a wait and see position. What typically happens is that many website owners don’t take action until their results go into the tube. It’s not until after the Google Search Spit-take that many webmasters realize they have a problem. In this case, the spit-take will occur as soon your competitor decides to give News Releases a try and bumps you out of position with his own product.
You might be doing well now, but do not be complacent. Get your website connected on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and some form of PR site today. You can be the one who stays put in the rankings as everyone begins to adapt to these significant changes.
Lastly, I’m not going to recapitulate the reasons why you need to have your website built on a good Content Management System or CMS. The reasons are already spelled out elsewhere on this website. However, it is difficult for me to imagine that anyone would expect to be able to keep up with the publishing requirements laid out in this article without a CMS based website. Nuff said.
