Whenever I talk with new clients about social media initiatives, one of the key points is having a social media plan or strategy. Social media is a time and resource intensive effort, and if you spend the time up front developing a plan, you can distribute the work and make the overall project more effective in the long run. In this column, I’d like to take a look at how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (aka NASA) tackles social media.

Everyone has social media channels that they prefer to use, and by creating a social media hub with links to all of the social media areas they participate in, it makes it easy for end users, and search engines to discover them. Another interesting and noteworthy point, is that NASA has chosen to divide content into different channels, by mission. For example, there is a Facebook Channel for the Ares I-X program, a Flickr channel , a Twitter channel, and a YouTube channel. What this does is give them the flexibility to cross-post the best content. The best photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube were cross-posted into the Facebook account. But the Facebook account has other pictures that aren’t in the Flickr account. There’s overlap, but each channel has unique content or value add.

Another sticking point that many organizations face when engaging in social media is controlling the message. Many organizations favor a top down, tightly controlled, output of information. In fact, the NFL and Dreamworks Animation are inserting clauses and restrictions on Twitter usage for employees. In a recent interview about how NASA uses Twitter, it was revealed there are over 100 NASA employees using Twitter. While there isn’t an official policy in place, they do ask everyone to abide by their “release of government information guidelines” when using social media.

To get the most out of social media, it’s important for information be released in a timely fashion. Creating bottlenecks of very small groups of people who are allowed to publish/approve will limit your success. Instead, set up some ground rules, and let everyone who agrees to abide by them to publish freely. When you do, you end up with interesting and unexpected results, like this TwitPic of a spent rocket booster from the Ares X-1 launch bobbing in the ocean waiting to be recovered.

Here are some takeaways that you can put into action after looking at NASA’s strategy:

• Create accounts for each different type of platform (blogging, microblogging, pictures, and video). You may never use that service/content, but if you decide to, it’s good to already have an account in place.
• Unless one service offers an advantage which matches your vertical market, choose the most popular service.
• Be aware of market trends and shift accordingly, 2 years ago having a mySpace page was important, today it’s more important to be on Twitter and Facebook.
• Give each channel its own unique content, and cross promote the best of each channel. The best pictures and videos, should always make it into your blog, Facebook page and Twitter stream.
• Information wants to be free, set up basic guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable with your employees, and subcontractors. Don’t require anyone to become involved, but as long as it doesn’t interfere with their job, allow and encourage engagement.

As we are on the verge of the fourth quarter, a make or break time for many merchants and retailers, I decided to take a look at how some large and small merchants and retailers are using twitter.

BestBuy

BestBuy has a multi-pronged approach, the main account @BestBuy provides interaction for BestBuy’s employees. A secondary account @Twelpforce (which stands for Twitter Help Force) is geared towards helping customers with technical problems and issues. Another account, @GeekSquad focuses just on computer support for customers.

The thing that’s missing from this strategy, however, is a pure sales channel. BestBuy puts a lot of resources behind the sales flyers and promotional catalogs you get with your Sunday paper every week. There are certainly ways to leverage those promotions in conjunction with Twitter. While there is a @BestBuy_Outlet account, it has limited quantities of products available.

Another opportunity I think BestBuy is missing out on is by not capitalizing on the vanity account name. The account @BestBuy is going to be where most people who might be interested in BestBuy will start to look, if they see it’s an employee centric account, they might not dig deeper. In my opinion, BestBuy should use the main account as a public facing account, have a dedicated account for sales/specials, and relocate the employee account to another name.

When many people hear multiple accounts, they assume this means an increase in time and resources you need to devote to twitter. This simply isn’t the case anymore. There are tools that allow you to manage multiple accounts from one interface like Easytweets, TweetDeck, and HootSuite, which make switching from one account a single painless mouseclick. If you do decide to use multiple employees, a product like CoTweet can help you do it more effectively.

Toys R Us

It’s rare to find an account that can blend promotions with customer and community engagement and keep it balanced, but @ToysRUs is one of them. Another interesting thing that this account does is distribute links to online only and offline only coupons. This works because ToysRUs has a large number of locations, and it gives them the ability to track how effective Twitter is for them.

At first glance, this would seem to be a very active account with multiple tweets per day, however what they are really doing is leveraging content from the blog at Toys.com which automatically posts to the twitter account. As long as you write your blog posts knowing they will turn into individual tweets, and schedule your posts for “prime time” (9 to 5, when people should be working) it can be very effective.

One of the criticisms many merchants have about using Twitter as a sales channel, is everyone is looking for discounts or deals. While that can be attributed partially to the anemic economic rebound, that is a fair criticism. If as a merchant or retailer, you aren’t prepared to offer discounts, sales, or other preferential pricing you will probably have a lot of difficulty making Twitter contribute to your bottom line.

For merchants who are willing to offer discounts there is substantial audience. For example, @CouponTweet which launched early this year is approaching 25,000 followers, and there are other accounts related to coupons with thousands of followers as well.

If you’re a merchant or retailer and are looking to engage on Twitter, or have an existing account and are looking to get more value out of here are some tips:

• Decide if you are going to go with a single or multiple account strategy. Try to gauge the amount of interest for different channels when making your decision.
• Look for ways to engage directly with your existing followers, or the followers of related, and similar companies. Not every tweet should have commercial intent.
• Look for opportunities to leverage your existing content into your Twitter account. Your Twitter account should have some unique elements but it’s, OK to mix in your blog posts or other content.
• Tweet when you have the opportunity to reach the most followers. Not everyone is in your time zone, so you can tweet more than once per day.
• Track your Twitter promotions with landing pages, tracking URL’s, coupon codes and cookies.

When working with different clients on social media related projects, one of the interesting aspects to look at is whether or not their industry embraced Twitter, and how well are the industry as a whole is using it. In some cases there is little to no engagement, in other cases the industry has embraced the medium, from large brand name corporations all the way down to local providers. In this article, we’ll be looking at the travel industry, which has a very high level of engagement on Twitter.

As I’ve stated in the past, there isn’t a right or wrong way to use Twitter, only a way that helps you meet your goals. However, when most companies use Twitter they fall into three general categories:

• Community engagement and customer service
• Broadcast channels for news, articles, and information
• Dedicated sales channel

It’s not surprising that the accounts with some of the highest follower counts, in some cases over a million followers, are those that fall into the “community and customer service” category, examples of these would be @jetblue, @southwestair, and @alaskaair. Traditional publishers such as @LATimestravel, @nytimestravel and @TravelMagazine use Twitter as a broadcast channel for their articles. An interesting variation of this method is used by @EmiratesAir, who tweets links to  publications and articles about Emirates Airlines. Examples of sales channels include @Expedia and @SpiritAirlines.

It’s worth noting that very few people use it purely for community engagement, broadcasting or sales; instead, most use a hybrid strategy, with the majority of tweets falling into one category, but having some tweets of each type. In some cases, it makes sense to create a separate dedicated channel. An example of multiple channels comes from @jetblue who recently introduced @JetBlueCheeps specifically for discounted fares. Some companies also use Twitter to extend their real world marketing efforts  and specialty campaigns such as the Travelocity Traveling Gnome @roaminggnome and Priceline’s William Shatner Price Negotiator @TheNegotiator.

As Twitter becomes a “breaking” news channel for many, the importance of having a presence on Twitter can’t be understated. For a small but vocal part of the population, Twitter is a primary news source, a prime example of this occurred during the US Airways Flight 1549 emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York City. Some of the earliest reports and photographs from the incident appeared first on Twitter. US Airways scrambled during a crisis to get an account working to push out official information @USAirways. The account has become dormant now, but the key point is if your customers are looking information here, you should be there too. The use of Twitter isn’t limited just to commercial and private organizations, for example the US State Department issues travel information via @TravelGov, as does the US Forest Service @forestservice.

While the majority of the organizations that get most attention on Twitter are larger national groups, there is a growing and active local travel component as well. Local but well known tourist destinations such as the Queen Mary in Long Beach have a presence on Twitter, @QueenMary. However smaller travel groups and companies such as Ohio Travel Association @OhioTravel, St. Louis Hilton @HiltonSTL, Tuscon Radisson @RaddisonTuscon, Alcatraz Cruises @AlcatrazCruises, and Air Ship Ventures @AirShipVentures are also on Twitter.

One of the biggest resistance points I get when I talk with clients about using Twitter or social media in general, is the fear of negative press and negative communication. However, hiding from negative feedback isn’t going to make it go away, remaining mute only makes you a bystander in the communication. One of the most disliked organizations in the world- the TSA, has a blog and presence on twitter @TSABlogteam, and should be case study for anyone concerned about negative feedback. For companies who still decide not to participate, the problem of fans or someone else developing a presence in their absence still exists. Case in point, the @AmtrakNews is an unofficial news feed for Amtrack. The @Amtrack profile is a non-malicious brand squat, it appears she’s securing “AM Track” and not trying to pretend to be the company. Sometimes a brand advocate or fan can also start up a profile, such as this fan from KLM Airlines @klmfan. The worst case scenario is if one of your detractors sets up a profile such as the @IHateEasyJet profile.

For companies who decide to participate but aren’t sure how and when to engage, the best suggestion is proceed slowly and with caution until you feel comfortable. Larger companies may find benefit in having more than one person doing the actual tweeting. In most cases, it’s best to let people know there are multiple people responding and to identify who is responding with initials or some other easily identifiable abbreviations. Some profiles such as @FrommersTravel link their twitter profile to a page with information about who is tweeting. If your organization is uncomfortable about how and when to engage others directly, you should review the US Airforce Social Media Response Chart (PDF) for guidance.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that participating in social media can amplify the voice and exposure of people or organizations who would normally have a very small reach. One social media advocate, @AdventureGirl has in excess of 1 million followers. There are a handful of travel bloggers @everywheretrip, @ecointeractive, @kathika, and @WeBlogTheWorld who each have between 50,000 to 100,000 followers, and yet, aren’t well known brands.

Below you’ll find a list of over 100 different noteworthy Twitter profiles from the travel industry. In the interest of full disclosure, there are a few (<5%) companies listed below which I have had working relationships with.

Airlines

Rental Car Companies

Hotels and Hotel Chains

Cruise Lines

Travel Providers and Aggregators

Travel Magazine & Newspapers

Travel TV & Radio Shows

Travel News and Information

Travel Bloggers & Social Media

While Twitter is getting the lion’s share of all the social media and micro-blogging sites from the press and the blogosphere, there are other alternatives. I’m going to take you through 5 different micro-blogging platforms, pointing out the good, bad, and sometimes ugly. I’ll also point out some suggestions on how you can integrate them into your social media campaign, and maximize their SEO value.

Posterous

Posterous is my favorite micro-blogging platform in this article. It’s extremely easy to set up and use; the only thing you need to get started is a working email account. Technically, you don’t even need to create an account to get started – however, I recommend you do, as it allows you to manage the operation. To get information into Posterous, all you need to do is email to post@posterous.com, text, pictures, even video – they handle the whole thing. If you’ve gone through and created an account, you can unleash the power of Posterous, by connecting to Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, Picasa, Wordpress, Facebook and a handful of others, the process is unbelievably easy. You can set up where each item is posted by default or on a post by post basis.

Even more amazing is the fact that you can use it as a full fledged blog if you want to. It’s a really good choice for someone who want to write and doesn’t want the technical hassles associated with running a blog. The bad part is that you’re developing a website on the subdomain of another company, so if you decide to move to a different platform in the future,  all of the link equity and traffic you built will vanish. There is an option to run Posterous on your own domain if you are comfortable changing your A-Name records.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are clean and taken from your post titles as is the HTML title. The biggest danger of the default installation is sitting on someone else’s subdomain. Setting it up on your main domain or as a subdomain on your domain is better, but the software isn’t available, so you’re locked in.

My suggestion is to use it as temporary blog for a short term event or promotion. Does your company exhibit at or visit a lot of trade shows or other venues where you interact with fans or customers? This would be a great tool to document and share, because it’s fast and easy to set up and get running. You could mail pictures, videos, stories of the event into Posterous very easily. You could even set up an email alias to allow customers to send you their pictures as well (I’d suggest turning on moderation if you do).

FriendFeed

If Posterous makes micro-blogging quick, easy and useful, FriendFeed is at the complete other end of the spectrum, filling your data stream with lots of noise, data, and in this author’s opinion being completely unusable. What FriendFeed does is allow you to aggregate all of your social media information into one stream –  all of your tweets from Twitter, links from StumbleUpon, pictures from Flickr, Facebook updates, Blogger posts, and so on – are now in one nice package to share with your friends.

On the surface this sounds like a really great idea, but it quickly turns into an unmanageable fire-hose of information. If you have a small group of friends who are active in social media, it quickly becomes so noisy that it becomes impossible to extract the value. There are, however, a few people who find FriendFeed valuable, such as Robert Scoble, so I invite you to read his post on how he uses it and why he likes it.

From an SEO perspective, the biggest benefit you can get from FriendFeed is traffic – if a high profile user puts one of your URLs into their stream. All of the outbound links on FriendFeed are no-followed, so there isn’t any link equity being passed. The links are long, but they do have keywords from the title in them, so it’s possible to link to a page within the website and use some satellite optimization techniques.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another micro-blogging platform that is very similar to Posterous. It allows you to post text, pictures, video, audio, chat and links. Currently the only other micro-blogging platform it interfaces with is Twitter. Tumblr does give you a little bit more control over how your micro-blogging platform looks visually,  for example, if you want to use hi-res photos, post in a specific time zone, enjoy the ability to import links, and toggle a few other settings. Similar to Posterous, you can move Tumblr onto your own domain.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are on the long side, but have keywords and are clean, the titles are sub-optimal as they all have the “my tumbles” before the post title. They also suffer from the same subdomain issues that were mentioned above.

One of the more interesting uses of Tumblr comes fromTwitter, which uses it as a status blog for downtime or tech issues. Mainstream users include musicians such as Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz. From an SEO perspective, the URLs are long, but do have the keywords from the title, however, the pages titles also have the sub-optimal blog title before post title arrangement.

While Posterous and Tumblr are very similar, Posterous has much stronger cross-media integration, although Tumblr has a lot more flexibility as far as design and styling options. You’ll need to decide which of those is more critical for your project.

Dailybooth

The next micro-blogging platform we’ll be looking at is Dailybooth and deals only in pictures. The concept behind Dailybooth is to take and upload a picture of yourself everyday, and chronicle your good days, bad hair days, and dog blogging days. It’s simple to use – you upload or email in your pictures and it’s done.

As this service is only for pictures it is somewhat limited, and probably best used as a niche tool that’s part of a social media strategy. They have a lot of widgets that make it simple to integrate into a blog or other website.

From an SEO perspective, it’s worth noting they’ve gone with the sub-folder approach instead of subdomain. Individual pages have a numerical sequence number, but they do also have the keywords in the HTML title.

Some possible uses might be a fashion website that uploads pictures of outfits. Sell t-shirts? Upload a picture of you or someone on your staff in t-shirt every day, try to start a picture meme. Most people on the site use it for pictures of themselves, but I didn’t see anything saying it was limited to that. Run a cooking site? Why not put up pictures with link to recipes or cookware items? Personally, I really like this site – it’s simple, easy to use and has the potential for a lot of run.

12 Seconds

12 Seconds is a micro-blogging video website. We’ve all been sent links to 8 minute YouTube videos where there is really only a small bit of content that’s entertaining. 12 Seconds combats that by limiting the length of your uploads to just  12 seconds. Making a video that’s interesting but is only 12 seconds can be a bit of challenge. Currently, they only offer integration with facebook and twitter.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are sequential number strings without any keywords. However, the page does have the title of the video. It sits within a subfolder of a larger site, so it doesn’t have any of the subdomain issues.

As this is a fairly limited site and the 12 second cap makes things difficult, my advice is use this for limited purposes. One interesting use I saw, was asking people to sing their national anthem in 12 seconds or less,  and here’s an entry from Shoemoney. Using it for fast-talking contests related to your site would be something that could generate viral interest if done correctly.

In my opinion, the key with micro-blogging sites is simplicity. The easier it is to use, the more likely people are to use it, and the more successful you will be trying to leverage it to help promote your website. I’d suggest testing each of them before deciding on one over the other. If you are going to do any promotional activities, opening up a dialog with the site owner is a good idea as well.

Don’t focus solely on sites that allow you to put up straight links; instead focus on sites that are more socially engaging and allow you to implement ideas that have a higher likelihood of going viral – getting you press and links outside of the site itself.

One of the most interesting aspects of social media is the fact that there really aren’t any rules, anyone can use the platform however they want. When it comes to Twitter, a lot of organizations that aren’t associated with cutting edge marketing tactics are using some creative, outside of the box thinking. In fact, some of them are acting like animals … literally.

First up is the Whale in the Natural History Museum of New York. If you’ve never been to the Natural History Museum, there actually is a large whale hanging from the ceiling there.

The whale tweets about a lot of things from children underneath, things going on at the museum, whale facts, even having a little fun with the night watchman. The Natural History Museum isn’t the only famous whale on twitter, you can also find Shamu the mascot of Seaworld. Killer whales aren’t as docile, and looking at this account, you can see it’s quite a bit more snarky in tone.

This account tweets lots of pictures, such as rescue efforts, funny animal pictures, contests, and a bit of killer whale humor. Museums, aquariums and zoos aren’t traditionally organizations that embrace this type of bleeding edge marketing efforts, but there are lots of other zoos and aquariums who using Twitter effectively:

Fictional characters on Twitter aren’t limited just to animals, the Mars Rover and Mars Phoenix landers gave personalities to robots in 2008. You can also find Darth Vader and The Joker on Twitter as well.

While smaller and mid-sized business may not have the luxury of well known characters or mascots, they can replicate and adapt some of the tactics and strategies used by these accounts. Here are a few suggestions to help you put your plan into action:

1. Be transparent. If you are going to pretend to be an animal, people can figure out there is a human behind the keyboard without you telling them. The closer you come to pretending to be an actual person, the clearer you need to be about who you really are.
2. Role Accounts. Use role accounts like “HardwareHelper” or “MrAccounting” instead of accounts with actual names in them.
3. Be an Actor. Portraying a fictional character like “TechLepruchaun” you’ll be able to get away with a little bit more than “BobFromTech”.
4. Multiple Authors. Using multiple authors is a smart strategy for many companies, it keeps any single employee or subcontractor from feeling they own the account.
5. Keep a Consistent Voice. If you do use multiple people, try to use the same voice or tone as much as possible.
6. Engage Your Audience. Don’t use Twitter strictly as a broadcast medium, find ways to interact with the people who follow you.
7. Use Humor and Current Events. Look for opportunities to inject a bit of humor into the account whenever possible. Current events are another opportunity, for example: the Natural History Whale used Sarah Palin’s stance on whale hunting to promote whale conservation links.

As businesses become more virtual in organization and structure, and more workers become digital nomads, the question of  whether having a physical, real-world address on your website will have any effect on your rankings becomes more important. In this article I’ll take a look how a real world address can have some impact on your sites organic listings.

Let’s look at the auto repair sector. We’ll be looking at national chain/franchises, whether they have a corporate address in the footer or on the site, public or private whois data, does the whois data match and do they have a crawlable/indexable location directory. Below is a matrix of all the data:

* – on subdomains

With all of the possible cities in place we’ll look at searches for [ciytname auto repair] we’ll be looking at two separate issues: the local/map onebox listing and the standard listing in the normal SERP’s.

Data for Google local onebox results comes from a variety of sources including telephone listings, so having an address on the site provides very little benefit to getting your website to appear there.

At the surface it would seem that having an address on the site has very little or no influence on organic rankings, as Meineke and Midas are the only websites that are showing up in the organic listings. Looking back at the first chart we can see that while everyone had public whois data available, the only two who had matching on site addresses and whois data where Meineke and Midas, are the only two who showed up in the organic listings.

But look at the SERP’s for Chicago Auto Repair and Charlotte Auto Repair. Midas and Meineke are the only websites that rank—but they are also the only ones that don’t have the city name in the title—nor do they have the address or city name anywhere on the page.

The key point is not to think of having an address or having a matching address as an on/off switch for ranking. Instead think of it as part of a websites overall trust score. Having a private registration, no address, or non matching addresses may not act as a negative, but having matching on-site addresses seem to act as positive. Again it’s not required for a website to rank, but it does seem to help.

It’s also important to note that Google was able to attribute the city data to the home page, when in this case that information was only present on about us and contact pages of the site. Trust has been a component in Google’s algorithm for some time even before Eric Schmidt’s comment about the internet being a cesspool and brands were the key to sorting it out. If you go back to the Google Librarian newsletter of 2006 , you’ll see Google gives some advice on things to look for when determining if a site is trustworthy. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to assume some of these factors are probably already built into the algorithm.

How can webmasters and site owners take advantage of this to help their websites seem more trustworthy to Google? Using fake or false whois data is not only risky but put you at risk of losing your domain as it’s against ICANN regulations. Additionally if you’ve spent any time testing Google maps you’ll also know that Google recognizes real address, or least those it has never seen before, identifying them with “did you mean” response. Using a post office box isn’t a viable solution either as Google isn’t able to locate them on a map.

Another option is using a Mailboxes, Etc. or UPS mailbox location. In a post 9/11 world the postal regulations have required these companies to stop using the “suite” designation for mailboxes. They are now required to use PMB # (Personal Mail Box) for all addresses. In practice if you put suite or just # you would probably get your mail. How closely ICANN regulations are in line with 9/11 postal homeland security restrictions is uncharted territory.

If you’ve come to the realization that Google is all but forcing you to create a profile , you might have learned something in the account verification process. One of the two methods Google uses to verify profiles is via telephone. I’ve had several phone numbers, many of which have been around for almost 5 years, however the only one Google was willing to verify was the listed one in the phone directory. Is Google using the same or similar technology to verify address data that’s on your site or listed in your whois file, only the folks working at the Googleplex know for sure. However I’ll firmly grab the ear-flaps on my conspiracy theorist tin foil hat and say at the very least it’s plausible, and it wouldn’t surprise me if address information worked it’s way into the algorithm in the next 3 to 5 years.

In conclusion, putting a real world verifiable address on your website appears to increase its chances of looking more algorithmically trustworthy to Google. The effects may not be immediate, but in my opinion, are forward-looking steps to give your website a bonus your competition may not be getting.

Most people in the industry look at contests and incentives as branding and marketing tools. However if you are willing to get creative, you can turn a contest into a powerful link building tool that will, over time, help your organic rankings.

When most marketing and advertising teams look at a contest they are looking for mass exposure, so they choose a prize that is going to have wide appeal, like an an iPod or iPhone. However as an SEO you need to look at this as an opportunity to build the anchor text you want, especially the really hard to get commercial anchor text. Want to rank for “Las Vegas Hotels?” Tun a contest giving away a Las Vegas hotel room. Want to rank for “coach handbags?” Then give away a Coach handbag.

When going for links like this, the prize may actually cost more than a low level prize the marketing/advertising department had budgeted for. If that’s the case, it’s your job as an SEO to show how important and valuable getting those anchor text rich inbound links are worth. Unless you’re giving away an exotic sports car, the links you generate are almost always worth more than the prize due to the rankings they can produce and the significant amounts of traffic they generate.

The next step is to think about your landing page. I’m not talking about the design/layout of the page—I’m talking about the URL. Try to choose a URL that has the keyword in it and that you can use after the contest. For example this URL:

http://example.com/las-vegas-hotels/

has much more staying power than either of these:

http://example.com/las-vegas-hotel-contest/
http://example.com/contest/las-vegas-hotel/

Another mistake a lot of people make is that after the contest ends they leave the page up with a notice the contest is over, or 301 the content to another page. A better solution is to leave the existing URL in place and just improve the page with different content. If you are concerned about usability, you can relocate the contest information to a new URL with a link at the bottom or even display a message based on incoming referral URL’s or referral keywords. If you’ve already got a commercial page about the particular item, this doesn’t present a problem. I bet you’d really like to have a second indented listing for your keywords, so leave the original page up—just make sure the two pages really are different.

Don’t miss the opportunity to generate views for any videos you may have. Including informational videos on contest pages is an easy way to increase the views on those videos, especially if they are short, to the point and helpful. The number of times a video has been viewed plays a role in YouTube popularity rankings and in getting videos to show up in Google universal search results.

A caveat: Contests, sweepstakes, incentives and giveaways, legally speaking, are much more complicated than—in my opinion—they need to be. Laws vary considerably from state to state, so before starting down the contest path make sure you do your due diligence and consult with an attorney and make sure you aren’t creating a legal headache for yourself.

Most SEOs will agree that the title element is your strongest on-page element, and optimizing the title is critical for rankings and traffic. However when the keyword or phrase you are targeting has both a singular and plural version, many people have a difficult time optimizing for both. Novices decide to create a page for both the singular and plural version or just target the one term usually with the higher search volume. However with some careful planning it is possible to get both versions in your title tag.

For example lets assume you are an SEO consultant. Chances are you want to rank for both phrases [SEO Consultant] and [SEO Consultants]. However creating a separate page for each one would be awkward from a user point of view, as there isn’t really a need for two pages with content that will ultimately be very similar. In this case what you would want to do is find a way to get both versions in your title tag without it looking keyword stuffed. You could do something like this:

John Smith SEO Consultant, SEO Consultants

While that does have both terms it’s awkward and spammy looking. Here’s an alternative that is better:

SEO Consultants: John Smith SEO Consultant

The words are identical; however by changing the order it becomes much more readable and useful. Let’s try a commercial example:

Discount Disney Vacation, Disney Vacations

Again the wording is awkward, looks keyword stuffed and appears spammy. However by changing the order and adding a word we can come up with something much more useful:

Disney Vacations – Planning a Discount Disney Vacation

Experimenting a bit more you could even come up with something more useful and purchase driven:

Disney Vacations – Find A Discount Disney Vacation Online

The next time you are trying to target singular and plural phrases or phrases that are very close, look for ways to add an extra word or two, experiment with word order, and incorporate some natural language into your title. With a little effort chances are you’ll find a way to get both singular and plural forms of your keywords into your title, and be more click enticing.

Over the past few years, all of the search engines have made tremendous strides in trying to discover different parts of the web, find deep content and understand complex URL structures better. The first big stride came when each of the search engines adopted the XML Sitemap protocol. Website owners now had the ability to give the search engines a list of all of their URL’s.

A few weeks ago, another major step occurred when the search engines announced the adoption of a canonical URL tag to help them understand what the true URL is. The problem with this is that designers and developers are starting to use these tools as a crutch to compensate for a site architecture that is un-crawlable, poorly designed and unnecessarily confusing.

While you can use a sitemap to provide search engines with the URL’s, if you don’t provide a crawlable navigation scheme, you remove the power of internal anchor text from your website. Without that internal anchor text, you make it harder for the search engines to understand what your pages are about. Additionally, by removing the internal navigation, you lose the ability to help the search engines understand which parts of your website are important and set up a hierarchy.

Sitewide links across the top, side and footer areas help search engine find the high level key areas of your website. While there is an importance level tag for each URL in an XML sitemap, exactly how much weight, if any the search engines put on it, remains open for debate. Internal anchor text is big part of the puzzle, and removing it is like forgetting to put the sugar in your cookie recipe and expecting everything to come out of the oven tasting the same.

The new canonical tag solves the problem of pages with identical or nearly identical content existing for different URL’s. The search engines have indicated they will use this as signal to determine the proper URL but it is not an absolute declaration of the proper URL. For example, let’s assume this is a URL:

http://example.com/videos/

But people have the ability to sort page elements, producing URL’s like:

http://example.com/videos/?sort=newest http://example.com/videos/?sort=mostwatched http://example.com/videos/?sort=funniest

What happens when those URL’s start acquiring more backlinks than the pure URL, which is specified in the canonical tag – which URL will the engines prefer? Don’t think it matters? What if instead of a “sort” parameter you use an affiliate ID parameter, and it acquires the most backlinks, and starts to outrank the proper URL specified in the canonical tag? It might look something like this:

http://example.com/?aff=12345

As a website owner, you might be giving away a commission to someone who didn’t deserve it.

The takeaway here is that you should design your website structure and CMS to use and be naturally crawlable, with search engine friendly URL structures. Tools like sitemaps and canonical tags should supplement, but never replace or displace standard crawling as the way your website interacts with search engines.

Article directories and article syndication websites are one the earliest forms internet marketing, but do they still work and are they worth the effort? The main problem with syndicated articles is that they will most likely be seen as duplicate content, which Google claims will be filtered out of organic SERP’s. Article directory owners tell a different story. In a style reminiscent of late night infomercials, they will talk about the exposure benefits and tidal waves  of traffic that contributions to article directories can bring. So where’s the truth? In this article we’ll be taking a look at article directories, if there are any benefits, and if you can use them to help your organic rankings.

Looking at article directory stats

Here’s a look at give top tier article directories and their traffic ranking and standings:

Using Compete.com for keyword research, here is a list of some of organic non-brand name keywords each of these article directories ranks for:

Performing a page level backlink analysis on these pages showed that all but one had a very small number of external links. Instead of external links, these pages ranked on the combination of domain trust, internal anchor text, and on page SEO.

One of the benefits of using article syndication websites used to be the backlinks. However a look through most of these websites now shows that many are using the nofollow tag, negating the effect of any backlinks. The secondary benefit came from the links embedded in the articles that were being syndicated. Again, a page level backlink analysis showed that the majority of these inbound links were no-followed, removed, or on websites of low or questionable quality. However there were a few mid-level quality, straight links that turned up.

So is submitting content to article directories still worth doing? Once you leave the top tier article sites, the drop in quality and traffic is fairly steep. For anything more competitive than long tail 4+ word keywords, it is my opinion it’s not worth the effort. Unless you are targeting extremely uncompetitive phrases, with disposable URLs, mass submission and blaster software, is also not worth the time and expense.

However, that doesn’t mean article directories should be completely ignored. For new and developing websites, article syndication can have some value for self promotion and the occasional mid-level backlink. The danger however is having your article, on a domain with more trust, outranking you in the SERPs. Most article directories have fairly aggressively placed advertising, and the likelihood of someone not clicking a competing advertisement and making it to the bottom and using your link are fairly slim. So I would recommend using  second tier content that’s not quite good enough for your website. Never duplicate content on your website and an article directory. It forces the search engine to choose who is the original and who is the duplicate. Instead opt for a complete rewrite.

One of the more controversial ways to use an article directory is for reputation management. This approach allows you to use the domain trust, internal anchor text and on page SEO factors of the directory to your advantage. The likelyhood of an article directory outranking your main domain for your company name is fairly small. However, in many cases it does have the potential to outrank most user-generated content or review-based websites that might be ranking for your name. A carefully crafted title, combined with a few targeted links from your official website can carry a lot of weight, and usually displace negative listings.