If a post goes up on Twitter or Facebook, and no one is around to engage with it, does it still make a sound? Not if you’re trying to build up a brand it doesn’t.

If you are doing SEO of any form, you’ll know one of the biggest and most important challenges is finding links. A quick and easy way that I recommend to companies that I work for or with is to guest blog on various sites. It’s even better when you know about a site like Ranker, where it’s extremely easy to create content and links that not only have an SEO benefit, but also, a traffic benefit to your site.

I’ve watched Ranker create a fun and easy platform for the creation of lists of all times, from The 10 wackiest lawsuits ever filed to Top Celebrity Homes on the Market in LA. It’s been great watching it grow as a product and having used it, I know how quick and painless it is to create lists of all types that will not only create links to external sites but also generate referral traffic.  Also, each post has a link to your twitter account, so, it’s also a great way to get an increased following on social.

Ranker is a site about lists – all kinds of lists – that launched in August 2009 and now has well over 2 million monthly uniques. The best part is there is no one to reach out to at another website to sell them on being a guest author, it’s completely UGC. Basically, just create an account, start posting, and start promoting the content. And, we all know how easy it is to create a top 10 list that’s somewhat relevant to your site, anyone can do that, even my 1 year old nephew.

Obviously like anywhere and anything else having to do with content on the web, if you create a list that sucks, it’s not going to get much play. But, create an awesome list like Top 10 Celebrities Who Have Had Weight Loss Surgery and next thing you know, you’ve got powerful pages linking back to your domain from an external site. Again, it’s not just that, but, if it’s an effing amazing list and the team notices it, you’re likely going to get a good amount of referral traffic as well.

It’s super easy to make a list. You name your list, have the option to choose a category (or you can do an open-ended list), and build your list using a Netflix-esque drag-and-drop-with-autosuggest interface. If your list is in a category (like People, or TV, or Companies), the items you add to your list will likely already be in Ranker’s database with preloaded images.

Even if you have content that doesn’t fit nicely into their existing categories that gets lost in the algorithmic shuffle, interesting lists and effing amazing lists usually do fine regardless. So, if you have something like 9 Most Requested Celebrity Noses, even if there isn’t a “plastic surgery” category, you can do what this guy did and use the “people” category instead to give it that extra boost.

The way you get back links

There is a “site:” field in Ranker’s list editing screen where you can add a backlink with anchor text without even having to know any HTML. The link is high up enough on the page – right below the title of the post and to the right of your Ranker username. The links are dofollowed and are prominent enough that they can drive some traffic to your site, of course, you still need to have great content to get clicks. The other positive is if other viewers of the list have a site, tumblr, etc. it’s possible to get second order effects of linking from them as well. aka more seo goodness.

Note that the “site:” link is somewhat hidden in Ranker’s list edit platform – you can find it on the right side of the page to the right of the area where you describe your list. As an added bonus, you also get to put links on your Ranker profile page which is automatically generated – a good opportunity for either a slightly different anchor text term, or an entirely separate link (and if you have a Twitter or a Facebook fan page they have a link slot for that as well).

Spam gets filtered out

If you’re worried about this becoming another shitty seo wasteland like squidoo used solely for backlinks, try throwing up a page with just a single link up and see if you can find it without going directly to the URL. Ranker has built some pretty intelligent algorithms that hide obviously-spam or clearly rushed content pretty quickly – while your post won’t be removed, it also won’t be linked to on many pages. Again, if you have shitty or no content, it’s worthless, just like anything else on the web.

So if you take a few minutes, put together a decently interesting list, give it an intro with a few sentences (this is another area you can use for promotional copy), add tags so it appears in more places on Ranker, etc, your post could get thousands of views and be a strong addition to your social media arsenal. You can also add videos or images without having to wrestle with embed codes. Ranker has a direct search portal into YouTube and an image API. I also highly recommend posting your list in “Blog View” (this is not the default view) unless you make a really long list. And title your list something clickable.

If you create a decent piece of content, odds are it will get views and rise in Ranker’s algorithmic content blocks, and perhaps Ranker’s editors will tweet it or add it to their Facebook stream. The better it does, the more search juice the post will have, and thus pass back to your site

(Disclaimer: I am an advisor for Ranker, and, I’ve been sitting on this post for a while because the site was a lot clunkier about a year ago, and, the traffic has gone up more than 10x. Also, while it seems like agenda pushing of my own, how many other guest blogging opportunities come with 2+ million uniques on quantcast. I’ve used it myself and I know others that have done so successfully as well (see above links), if nothing else, for the traffic benefit alone.)

At SMX West, Adam Audette mentioned that he had some success with the canonical tag and that in some cases he noticed that the canonical tag had been much more effective. It stuck in my head for a few months and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to test this out. Also, at SMX West, I talked about some of the gains that we saw because of finally implementing the canonical tag the right way. Trust me, it took a few tries to get it right!

As it turns out, I’ve been moving my personal blog to the Visible Factors blog and added a thoughts section on tonyadam.com, just to separate things a bit. (I know, that itself was a lot to digest!). But, before I 301 redirected the entire /blog/ section, I realized, “Oh! Perfect opportunity to test out the canonical tag.” So, I took two articles and implemented a cross domain canonical tag on one and a standard 301 redirect on the other. And, I was honestly shocked at the results. The test included two posts that I get a decent amount of traffic for. tweeting the post, and updating the posts in wordpress, basically, with the intention of forcing a crawl.

Cross Domain Canonical Tag vs. 301 Redirect Test:

For the cross domain canonical tag test, I took my post on Keyword Research and wanted to add the canonical tag for the post on visiblefactors.com. The 301 redirect test was based on my post on determining business development opportunities and I added a 301 redirect to the .htaccess file on tonyadam.com to permanently redirect that post. At that time, I went through the test, step by step.

Implementation of Canonical Tag and 301 redirect:

Cross Domain Canonical Tag:

I also implemented a 301 redirect on tonyadam.com:

redirect 301 /blog/508-find-and-close-business-development-opportunities/ http://visiblefactors.com/blog/2010/03/17/find-and-close-business-development-opportunities/

As of Saturday here was the rankings in SERPs:

SEO Keyword Research:

Business Development Opportunities:

Then I updated the posts in WordPress and posted a tweet on Saturday:

Tweet for canonical tag test:

Tweet for 301 redirect test:

Finally, as of Wednesday morning, here were the results in SERPs:

SEO Keyword Research:

Business Development (as of today):

Which should I implement?:

As you can see, the test proved Adam’s comments at SMX West about the canonical tag seeming like it was more effective instantly. The post on keyword research was updated in SERPs and seems to be more effective at updated the SERPs instantly. If that’s your goal, I would use the cross domain canonical tag implementation to get that done. It seems like it is the clear cut winner as the other post still hasn’t updated in the SERPs.

At the same time, I’ll be implementing a 301 redirect because I want my entire blog directory to be moved for all traffic to get redirected, etc. The test has shown me though that the cross-domain canonical tag is extremely effective. Especially in situation where you have identical content on two domains and you’d like to condense equity, but, both sites still need to stay up.

I’ll be running larger tests if possible over the next couple months and if possible share these results, but, if you’ve seen examples, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to guest speak with Richard Knafelc to the UCLA x425 extension course on SEO and Social Media for communications professionals thanks to Erik Deutsch. I love teaching and it was a great opportunity to do so, on my favorite topic of course.

We covered a lot of the basic principles of SEO from keyword research, to on-page SEO tactics and link building. The class also had some really good questions for Richard and I around things like Reputation Management, how Social Media helps SEO, etc. Here is my presentation that I gave the students:

visiblefactors did an excellent job helping us promote content via various Social Media channels. In 2008, the brought in We we’re extremely happy

Tony Adam is Founder and CEO of Visible Factors (a Prime Rank Media, Inc. company), has been in technology since 2000 and online marketing since 2003. Tony is an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and regular speaker at many technology and marketing conferences, including SMX, PubCon and SXSWI.

I’ve enjoyed spending much of my career learning and pushing myself as much as I possibly can. It’s the way I do things, I like to be in a fast paced environment, I like the adrenaline, and I hate feeling bored. A former manager once told me that I was better at what I did if I had 100 things going on, rather than only a couple. He also noted it was a bit freakish, but, none the less, I took it as a compliment. But, after trying to figure out why that was while talking to someone the other night, I realized the reason was momentum.

Having momentum is such an important part of business because it is what pushes us to be more productive, think on our feet, be a better decision maker, and achieve so much more. Leveraging the momentum you have to get shit done can be an unbelievably important. Also, that momentum will help your business through press, funding, or just building a better product. This holds true for all aspects of business: products, blogging, etc.

On the writing front I can crank out post after post when I have momentum going for me, but, when I lose that momentum, I tend to have a tough time getting anything down to blog about. I’ve even tried putting together an editorial calendar for blog, but, it never works. The only reason my last post wasn’t over a month and a half ago was that I stumbled on to the Facebook Like button update in the stream.

Another example of this comes when running a business. When you have momentum, you need to take full advantage because it can lead to press coverage, possible funding, and overall user interest. I’ve noticed it in the past and even as recent as a month ago. Watching meeting after meeting get cancelled, no clear direction being set, and feeling like the momentum was slipping. Admittedly, I was at fault for some of it, for once feeling like I had put too much on my plate and contradicting everything I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I was allowing prior commitments get in the way of making shit happen. So, I decided to change that and leverage the momentum I had previously been riding on and run with it. Maybe I needed time away at SMX West and SXSW to refresh and let that reality slap me right in the face. If that was the case, I’m glad it did, because now I am more motivated and ready to win than I have been in a few months.

On Thursday of last week, I had the opportunity to present at SMASH (Social Media Advanced Skills Huddle) at USC. What I was really excited most about was the fact that we had many of the Master in Human Behavior students in attendance at the conference and was great hearing their thoughts and insights around Social Media. I presented on Social Media ROI and while my presentation is below I thought I’d share a few highlights:

1. Create Goals and a Plan: I really do believe that before starting any campaigns and worrying about the tools to track ROI, you need to define what those goals are, what you’ll be measuring against, and have a plan to achieve those goals.

2. Value: When you set those goals, it’s also critical to understand what types of value Social Media Marketing is going to add to the overall campaign or your organization daily, monthly, or weekly. Some of those values can be increased engagement (e.g. mentions, blog comments, etc.), increased traffic, or increased brand recognition.

3. Platforms: While there are many Social Networks, Bookmarking, and news sites, it’s important to understand where your site should be represented on the Social Web. While the general Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are really important to have a presence in, if you participate in photography Flickr has a large community.

4. Use existing tools on Social Media Platforms: Facebook has their insights product for Facebook Page owners, StumbleUpon has domain stats (e.g. http://su.pr/domain/myspace.com), and Myspace has Artist Dashboards. These tools can take you a long way without having to pay for anything right off the bat, so, make sure to take full advantage of all the free tools you can.

5. Free and Paid Tools: Along that same note of taking advantage of all the free tools out there, bit.ly has good click tracking for URLs you tweet and I highly recommend to at least start there with tools. After that, it would be a good idea to start looking at tools like Alterian SM2, Radian6, Social Flow, CoTweet Enterprise, etc. that make the most sense for your organization.

Would love to get your thoughts around Social Media ROI and hear any tips you have for others out there that are learning and/or working on programs to track these metrics. Leave a comment and lets get the conversation rolling!

Well, it turns out that Facebook has included all of the meta data and thumbnail info for the like button around the web. This is great news for publishers as it gives the content that we and/or our users “like” more visibility in the Facebook stream. Along with that, it will likely greatly reduce the clutter that we see from around the web with share implementations, many publishers still have the facebook share and like button on their site. Time to clean up your UI!

I noticed the change this morning when I liked a TechCrunch article by Alexia Tsotsis about the epic Crush Notifier app for Facebook. So, as always in my morning reading, I liked it, and bam, there it was:

Previously the likes on Facebook wouldn’t even make it into the stream, it would only show up on your profile. A couple weeks ago I started noticing it in the stream, but, it was just the link and no thumbnail or meta data. Here is what you would see previously on the profile:

The only way to get the thumbnail and meta data was if someone commented on the item on your blog/website:

Anywho, I waited a little more and then liked another type of content, the Kim Kardashian profile on Myspace. And, here it is, again in the Facebook stream:

My guess is that this will dramatically improve the clicks that publishers and sites receive through the Facebook stream. Along with that, as we’ve known for sometime, Google and Bing have been using Social Signals for search rankings. I recommend removing Facebook Share implementations and start giving those like buttons more prominent placement on those pages!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments or if you have noticed anything different, since I just noticed the change this morning, would love to know if this is a test or full release. Don’t be shy, let’s get a convo going on pro’s, con’s, SEO benefits, etc.

Update: Mashable has written a post that confirms this and stay up to date with the news on Tech Meme

There is so much buzzing in the search industry from @arrington writing about why he thinks search still sucks and JCPenney being busted for paid linking. And, just weeks ago Google busted Bing for copying search results…or did they? Whew, I felt like that was one big run on sentence without no end in sight. And, to be honest, the story of search does not have an end in sight. This is a positive for innovation.

But, with all this circulation of posturing and calling people out, is anyone asking or answering the real questions? Is anyone talking about the innovation of search products and what is really needed out of the search industry. Yes, spam is a big problem, but, let’s be honest, the amount of spam in search is still no where near the amount of email spam that I get daily. It’s a never ending problem and always will be a problem. Alta Vista had the problem, Yahoo! Search did, and Google always has. Search Engines, will always be fighting “spam.” But, is it as bad as the 300+ emails that fill up my spam label in Google Apps? No where near as bad, so, why aren’t we talking about that? Probably because it’s not the fun thing to do. Even though search companies have announced they are using browser and toolbar click data while also using tweets and likes as part of their ranking factors, we still hear the complaints about how spammy search results are.

It’s fun to call out Google and even funner to call out people who attempt to monetize web products, like affiliate marketers and Demand Media for their “low quality content.” Affiliated, Demand Media, and many other content sites found opportunities in the market to create content at scale in order to drive traffic and grow a business. Is that so wrong? They aren’t sending you emails with ways to “enlarge yourself” or find pills cheaply. It is very easy for people to stand up and say Google is not doing a good enough job against spam, that Demand Media has tons of crappy content, and affiliate marketers are the skum of the earth. I know some amazing people and some of my favorite people that I’ve met through the years that are affiliate marketers, and let me tell you, they are no where NEAR as despicable as Bernie Madoff. So, maybe it’s time that people stop bitching about this, and start doing something useful with their lives.

The one question that is getting lost in all the crazy press and criticism is, how will search innovate and who is doing it? Sure, there was a massive debacle called Cuil and boy do we not want to see that again. But, how is Social Media playing a role in search. We’ve seen Google and Bing alike add layers to the SERPs with Videos, Images, Real-Time and results in your social circle. But, I still feel like we are still pretty plain when it comes to the search results page. Are we very far away from where we should be when it comes to innovation of a search results page?

Or, are we closer than we think? We’ve really seen the power of networks become so important over the last few years with sites like PayPal staying quite strong and Facebook growing at exponentially higher rates than any other company we’ve seen. Does that mean that we are far off from leveraging the power of network effects within search and the results pages? Currently search players are information networks, so, there is no growth at exponential paces. But, I think a company like Blekko has the opportunity to weed out spam through the power of networks. Using networks to define more personalized results and bring in your social circle into the SERPs. Blekko is already doing this buy leveraging “likes” to define results based on the likes you have via your facebook network, and, I’m sure there is more to come.

Blekko Facebook Connect Login:

The fact of the matter is though, after spending 8 years now in this industry, I’ve come to learn that there is nothing that can’t be gamed. As SEOs, we are known to “game” search results, as social media professionals, we are known to game user streams and social media news sites, and finally, I won’t get into email, but that one is very obvious. So, rather than seeing anymore posts about why search is broken, I’d like to see people talk about what searchers really like, what new things searchers are looking for, and I’d like people to cover the interesting new things that search startups, like Blekko, are doing.