Wikipedia and SEO
What’s the word on Wikipedia? The online, self-proclaimed “free encyclopedia” that uses collaborative software to allow you, me and anyone else with Internet access to add and edit entries has made quite a name for itself. With over 1.3 million articles, its own language (how many words can you put ‘wiki’ in front of, anyway?) and a big presence on search engine results, it seems at first glance like a good resource for an SEO program. Because of its age, freshness and authority, it would be an ideal resource for a link to your site. Not only would it be a valuable link from an optimization perspective, but could also a pretty decent traffic driver. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes unclear whether the effort of building a Wikipedia entry and gaining some inbound links is outweighed by the results.
It’s Not as Easy as it Looks
While it seems as simple as going to Wikipedia.org and adding an article, the reality is that Wikipedia has pages and pages of policies and guidelines that govern the content that gets added. It could take days to untangle the mass of interlinking pages of rules covering everything from civility to proper citation. Unwittingly make a mistake and you’ll have angry “Wikipedians” on you faster than bees on honey.
Neutrality Above All Else
Wikipedia prides itself on providing neutral information – something they believe arises out of the public vetting of articles until an agreed-upon version is reached. From the site: “All Wikipedia articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias.” So you can forget about posting a glowing article about your company, product or service – before you can say “Wikipedia” it will be changed to an unbiased version. With any article you add, you must be prepared to address the good with the bad, or your peers will do it for you. And if you were thinking, “I’ll just keep changing it back”, think again. To stave off “editing wars”, Wikipedia instituted the “3 revert rule”. A “reversion” is undoing all changes made after a certain time in the past (ie, getting rid of someone else’s edits and reverting to the original version). You cannot perform more than three reversions, in whole or in part, on a single Wikipedia article within a 24 hour period, or risk being blocked.
While you can’t post promotional articles for your company, product or service, it is a good practice to do a search for its name in Wikipedia and read the entries that talk about it, to make sure that it is represented in a correct manner. If any discrepancies arise, take the necessary steps to have them fixed.
Wikipedia also frowns upon adding links that overtly promote a site, so it’s certainly not a go-to link-building resource. A link you add will only remain if you’ve made a valuable contribution to the article and the site you’re linking to is a natural fit and provides even more information about the topic. Wikipedia believes that if the connection is there, the general public will take the initiative to add the link to your website – in short, your site must be worthy of earning the link.
When Can it Work?
There may be some instances where Wikipedia can help you gain traffic, though much is still left to chance so it should not be major part of your strategy. Try the following:
Try to think of an article or topic that you could write, centered around your business/industry. Make sure it is something that is closely related to your company, service or product.
Search Wikipedia to see what’s already there about the topic.
If there is no article about your topic of choice, go ahead and write an informative, unbiased article about the topic – keep the readers in mind and make it as useful and comprehensive as possible. Add one link to your site and keep your fingers crossed. If the link seems relevant, Wikipedia may let the link remain.
OR, find an existing article about a topic/keyword related to your business that needs some updating or that you can provide additional information or value to. Make your additions and then add a link to your company. If the addition is a good one, and the link makes sense, Wikipedia may (remember - fingers crossed!) let the link remain.
Another tactic is to try the foreign versions of Wikipedia, which aren’t under the same level of scrutiny as the English version. However, the foreign versions don’t have as much authority or link power as the English site, so the effect will be less.
Be careful about adding links to your site in the External Links section of other articles without also making some sort of worthwhile edit to the article. Wikipedians keep an eye out for external link spammers, and will quickly delete your links. Check out the “How not to be a spammer” section of this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam#External_link_spamming for guidelines to safely add external links that will last.
Wikipedia Wrap Up
My take on Wikipedia? It’s probably not worth the wikistress (yes, that’s actually a term in the Wikipedia glossary). It’s an interesting sociological experiment, with a noble goal of achieving truth (or at least an agreed-upon version of the “truth”) through collaboration and information exchange. But as far as SEO goes, it’s something for the bottom of your bag of tricks. Adding a link to Wikipedia is easy. Adding a link that has staying power is much harder. A link that only lasts a few days, or hours even, is not going to help you in the search engine rankings, so think twice and make sure the link you want to add is relevant.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Social Media Optimization (SMO) and You
From the blogosphere’s infamous exposure of CBS’ forged National Guard memos to the meteoric rise of MySpace and Wikipedia, it’s clear that the social media are a force to be reckoned with. Marketers have been quick to recognize the potential of online tools such as blogs, networking sites and wikis, giving rise to an offshoot of traditional search engine marketing strategy, called Social Media Optimization (SMO).
The term SMO was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations as a way of describing the strategic use of social networking tools for online marketing purposes. According to Bhargava, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
SMO is all about improving your online presence in a way that not only attracts, but also engages your audience. The goal is to enhance and promote your site so it appears frequently in online conversations, is more visible in the places where people hang out on the Internet (e.g., chat rooms, message boards), and appeals to visitors so they come back for more and share your site by word-of-mouth.
The concept recognizes that the social media can be integrated with your search engine marketing strategy to drive traffic to your site and increase awareness of your brand across different platforms. Some of the more popular social media services that can be used for this purpose include: MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Friendster, Blogger, del.icio.us, and HubPages.
Here are some tips to help you get started with SMO:
- Get in the habit of regularly updating your site with relevant, interactive content and useful resources. Try using a mix of audio, video, and written content.
- Use your site’s metrics to review which social media sites your customers are coming from and going to. These sites may be a good place to initiate your SMO strategy.
- Encourage linking by allowing visitors to “borrow” content from your site, such as special articles or videos.
- Provide different outlets for your content so visitors can decide what works best for them. In addition to offering a mix of audio, video and written content, visitors should be able to receive your offerings by RSS feed, e-mail subscriptions or other methods.
- Don’t just focus your Internet marketing strategy on your main site. With SMO, it’s important to branch out into the social media by creating wikis, MySpace or Friendster profiles, and to reach people who aren’t directly visiting your site.
- Make sure your SMO content is easy to find. For instance, be sure to submit your blog to blog search engines, such as blogsearch.google.com.
SMO and SEO easily overlap by improving search engine rankings, Internet visibility and visitor appeal, but that doesn’t mean they are one and the same. The main difference between the two is their focus: SMO places its emphasis on increasing your brand’s overall visibility in the social media instead focusing on improving your website’s rank in the search engines.
If you’re also doing SEO, here are a few things you’ll want to watch out for so your SMO strategy doesn’t conflict with your other search engine marketing strategy:
- Although you should encourage linking to facilitate good SMO, always avoid reciprocal linking because it’s a red flag for the search engines and can hurt your rankings.
- When making your site interactive, adding podcasts and other video/audio content is great for attracting visitors - just try not to get carried away. The search engine spiders can’t read this content, so be sure to keep plenty of optimized written content available on your site and in the social media.
- Remember to optimize your content. Incorporate keywords into your blog, wiki, networking site profiles, articles and other social media content. Also, include links in the content to increase your site’s search engine appeal.
- Never duplicate content because it cancels itself out on the search engines. Write fresh copy for each social media platform. If you offer articles or other content for distribution to other sites, make sure you only offer truncated versions that link back to the full text.
By integrating your SEO and SMO strategies, you can better promote your site and market your brand while taking full advantage of the Internet as a dynamic, social environment. Together these Internet marketing strategies make a powerful tag-team that will guarantee your site is fully optimized.
The term SMO was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations as a way of describing the strategic use of social networking tools for online marketing purposes. According to Bhargava, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
SMO is all about improving your online presence in a way that not only attracts, but also engages your audience. The goal is to enhance and promote your site so it appears frequently in online conversations, is more visible in the places where people hang out on the Internet (e.g., chat rooms, message boards), and appeals to visitors so they come back for more and share your site by word-of-mouth.
The concept recognizes that the social media can be integrated with your search engine marketing strategy to drive traffic to your site and increase awareness of your brand across different platforms. Some of the more popular social media services that can be used for this purpose include: MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Friendster, Blogger, del.icio.us, and HubPages.
Here are some tips to help you get started with SMO:
- Get in the habit of regularly updating your site with relevant, interactive content and useful resources. Try using a mix of audio, video, and written content.
- Use your site’s metrics to review which social media sites your customers are coming from and going to. These sites may be a good place to initiate your SMO strategy.
- Encourage linking by allowing visitors to “borrow” content from your site, such as special articles or videos.
- Provide different outlets for your content so visitors can decide what works best for them. In addition to offering a mix of audio, video and written content, visitors should be able to receive your offerings by RSS feed, e-mail subscriptions or other methods.
- Don’t just focus your Internet marketing strategy on your main site. With SMO, it’s important to branch out into the social media by creating wikis, MySpace or Friendster profiles, and to reach people who aren’t directly visiting your site.
- Make sure your SMO content is easy to find. For instance, be sure to submit your blog to blog search engines, such as blogsearch.google.com.
SMO and SEO easily overlap by improving search engine rankings, Internet visibility and visitor appeal, but that doesn’t mean they are one and the same. The main difference between the two is their focus: SMO places its emphasis on increasing your brand’s overall visibility in the social media instead focusing on improving your website’s rank in the search engines.
If you’re also doing SEO, here are a few things you’ll want to watch out for so your SMO strategy doesn’t conflict with your other search engine marketing strategy:
- Although you should encourage linking to facilitate good SMO, always avoid reciprocal linking because it’s a red flag for the search engines and can hurt your rankings.
- When making your site interactive, adding podcasts and other video/audio content is great for attracting visitors - just try not to get carried away. The search engine spiders can’t read this content, so be sure to keep plenty of optimized written content available on your site and in the social media.
- Remember to optimize your content. Incorporate keywords into your blog, wiki, networking site profiles, articles and other social media content. Also, include links in the content to increase your site’s search engine appeal.
- Never duplicate content because it cancels itself out on the search engines. Write fresh copy for each social media platform. If you offer articles or other content for distribution to other sites, make sure you only offer truncated versions that link back to the full text.
By integrating your SEO and SMO strategies, you can better promote your site and market your brand while taking full advantage of the Internet as a dynamic, social environment. Together these Internet marketing strategies make a powerful tag-team that will guarantee your site is fully optimized.
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