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:
- 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?)
- 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:
- they are generated by those interested in the brand/product
- 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
Hey Connie,
I’m a social media strategy consultant and also run a team of technical SEOs. I see a lot of misconceptions or myths when it comes to integrating the two. you pointed one out quite clearly:
“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?)”
keyword density (frequency) is dead and has been since the ’90s. the beauty of tech seo is the data we have access too :) search engines actually use co-occurrences which are the semantic relationships between words.
SEO and social media go hand in hand when it comes to building trust/authority/ranking kws/kw research/etc.
anyway, i could go on and on about this but thanks for the post,
Jacob
Connie:
Interesting topic here and one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and researching this week, as I look to improve the organic search results for our corporate website.
You’re right on about writing in natural language for the communities, but that doesn’t mean you (or someone) shouldn’t be thinking about SEO implications of the organization and content of your site.
And that should mean researching the keywords that people are actually searching for and then working those into writing, naturally, when it makes sense. For example (and this is completely made up), let’s say you like to use the phrase “community manager positions” as the title for an ongoing series on your blog or in a section of a forum. But what if, upon further research, you discover that people are searching on the term “community manager jobs” over “community manager positions” by a 10:1 ratio in Google. Why wouldn’t you change the natural language of your future blog/forum posts to reflect what you learned in your research.
Plus, there are best SEO practices (using accurate title and description tags; using , , and tags to accurately reflect the relative importance of text on a page; using logical keywords in your URL; using relevant keywords when linking, etc.) that aren’t spammy or “black hat” at all. Really, they’re all about organizing pages and sites in a way that makes sense for the user, use natural language, and help the search engines to better index your content.
And, of course, building and maintaining compelling content that people want to link to, talk about, and come back to again and again is always a must!
Seems to me that everybody wins this way.
Connie,
I’m a first-time reader, I ended up in your blog through Lee Odden’s. It seems to me your discussion of indexing community content is one of major interest for Google and other SEs.
With the ever-increasing Social Graph API, XFN, FOAF, and many other Social Media indexation applications running from Google with the purpose of better collect and index organic content, it is clear that community-created content will have a huge impact on search rankings/SEO.
Of course basic practices like title tags/descriptions still count, and I do believe in a certain amount of focus on specific keywords, but our major interest as internet professionals should be generating good quality content.
And Social Media offers a plethora of platforms to do just so. Like you said, there’s no need to TAG every piece of information; intelligent indexation is being tracked many different ways.
Excellent post, and very interesting discussion!
Leonardo Saraceni
[…] Connie Benson describes a conversation between her, Lee Odden, Albert Maruggi and Barry Judge about community building and SEO. Connie […]
As a former SEO guy turned social media marketer I’d still look at the basics if you’re thinking about optimizing social media: Use your keywords creatively in your titles, make sure your permalinks include the post titles, don’t overdo keyword usage, always emphasize value over SEO as it’s all about the conversation.
The viral spread of valuable conversations in social media is far more important than SEO. Only by really adding relevant value will others pass your contribution along- so an overemphasis on SEO can backfire in social media.
Connie,
I think the community managers first loyalty is to the company, and they best serve their company (or in our case, client) by building the community that serves its members best. Some might think SEO keyword placement is one of those gray areas where job 1 (serving the community owner) may conflict with job 2 (serving the communities members) but I couldn’t disagree more.
First off, SEO is critical to any business on the web, and enhancing SEO efforts is a tremendous ROI for your company/client. A well run community is an SEO driver, and the community manager has to stay on top of this commitment and keep the company decision makers aware of SEO impacts and implications. At Nattergalen we feel strongly enough about this that we include language in our contracts including the SEO consultant on the community advisory board we set up within client companies.
I think you raise a very good point on keping language free and natural, a keyword list should never impact communication. But the keywords should go into the community any way you can get them there. And you don’t have to disguise this from your members. You can even start a thread on SEO plans, let the members know what keywords you are targeting and ask them what they think. They will appreciate the inside information, and probably find the topic itself interesting. They will probably discuss the keywords, making them show on your domain multiple times and in context, which is a great way to get attention from intelligent search algorithms.
In the end, you can serve both masters at once. By being open and honest with your members, treating them like partners and collaborating with them you are serving members first. By working with your company/client to enhance their SEO operations you are giving them tremendous community ROI. And as is pretty much always the case in an online community, when you think about it and come up with a good operating plan working for the members and working for the company are always the same thing.
Hi, Connie,
Thought-provoking post, as usual. I’ve been thinking about SEO and community building lately, and wrote a couple of posts in my blog about it, including http://www.adventuresinsocialmedia.org/2009/04/which-comes-first-seo-or-active.html
I particularly liked Bryan and Scott’s comments, above. IMHO, you can subtly and naturally influence search engine results for your community content — and I argue that SEO is essential for building an active online community. SEO and community should become a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle.