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Thanks James, Excellent response. Are you or anyone else actually building back links to the social media page?

Interesting...is this common practice?

http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/failblog

SEOmoz showed a higher correlation between shares then likes in the last report they did on this, though it was only slightly higher. I have not seen anything directly, but I assume it's more difficult to get something shared and as such Google would probably value shares more then likes.

Well the simple answer is that I made a mistake. It popped up again today and after doing some research yesterday and this morning I realized it is being populated by an extension that I have for chrome (started wondering about that when it showed up today in Chrome but not FF). The social stats are being populated by the SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/diahigjngdnkdgajdbpjdeomopbpkjjc Evidently this feature works intermittently as I have never seen it before and it only worked once yesterday and only on this page and I have been using it for about a month (for some odd reason it doesn't work on any other page). So apologies for getting you all excited. If you want to read more about the tool SEJ did a review on it a while back: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-seo-tool-that-may-make-you-switch-to-google-chrome/20672/ Cheers

For content ideas, set up a news feed for yourself that is filtered for "teachers". I just read a story last night: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/20/why.quit.teacher/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 Take recent news stories, add your experience, insight and commentary so the article will be helpful to your readers.

I've been told that Google will rank a page higher for a local query if the address on the page has the city in it that was typed into the search bar.  If the address on the bottom of the page is  an Austin address, then a search phrase with Houston in it should cause the Austin addressed page to rank lower.  The Google Local page that i was going point the social icon to on our Houston page is our home office in Austin.  I wasn't sure if Google would see that their Local Page was an Austin address and cause my Houston page to rank lower for Houston searches.  That's kind of hard to explain, do you follow me?

Yeah - that's what I've been thinking.  Thanks.

Weird, what was the area if you don't mind asking. I have seen Facebook be a bit buggy with ads recently, but all the campaigns I have done usually target very large demos and broad groups I don't do niche targeting. My advice is to wait a week, try some new ad creative i.e. new images and what not and see if any changes happen. Or you could even try running the campaign off another account from the business. Kind Regards, James

While the topic is hot in the news, that is the time to submit to reddit, slashdot, digg, etc... Your idea of commenting on newspaper sites is a good one... pick the highest traffic ones. =========== Do this with all of your content... watch the news carefully... swiftly draw the proper sword at the proper time. Its your sword.

Well I know you can use Drupal with Oracle since version 7 now supports PDO, and there are even some modules out there to do the heavy lifting for you. However, for a blog Drupal is probably overkill. I would question your IT depts decision about not wanting to use MySQL/Wordpress before looking at using Drupal for just a blog. I've never used these lesser known CMS's, but you can try them out, they all work with Oracle db: ez publish, Mysource Matrix, Silverstripe, Typo3

Very interesting. Marc, James and Ryan: thanks for your insight guys!

Is this "(name of person) shared this" content showing on first page of results because they're in my social graph. Or would this content have been on 1st page regardless of whether it had been shared? The latest statement I heard from Google was the +1 data is being collect but is NOT being used to alter search results. They also made it clear that this data could be used in the future for that purpose. Why is google identifying who is sharing content when they're not in my social graph? There is a process from Google called Authorship where any content created by a known author can be identified with their picture. For example, do a search for Matt Cutts in Google and you will find the results which are authored by him recently from his blog show his picture. It is possible for him to author content elsewhere and it may or may not be identified with his picture depending on whether the publishing site used the proper tags. I believe the pictures you are seeing are from Author identification, not from the Google +1 process. This is the current Google standard now.

Thank you David and Gary. I have used the official one in the past from that exact page. Somehow I missed the iframe option. Any ideas for twitter?

Klout is a good tool for Twitter. It will give you the number of mentions, retweets, and their own algorithm of how influential you are, and how far your reach is. You can use it to look up any Twitter profile. They've just added FB and LinkedIn but I haven't tried it so can't tell you about it.

I operate on the assumption that the tweets will have zero value for rankings.  They are simply a way to spread the word about content and hopefully that word will spread to other social media channels.... then if the content is strong enough to earn links I will see ranking value.  I consider social media as a way to attract links without syndicating my content.

Hello, could you say what the name of that plugin?

It is really just a way to distribute your blog content to social media networks you have been neglecting or you aren't currently feeding content to on a regular basis. Because i work with photographers, it does help the bottom line, because as we gain followers we generate more clients. Is it a magic solution, no. Was it worth the time to implement, yes.