Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It's important to look at Twitter as a way to engage with your fans and get your content out there rather than solely as a way to increase your rankings. If you're not there to interact with people, you'll find that they get uninterested quickly. The same goes for Facebook, Google+, etc.

I love the idea that Aran mentioned about having a Youtube channel. You can do a lot with that and even could post the videos on your site and tweet those links. One of the greatest things I've found though is to simply ask! Ask your Twitter followers what they'd like to see from you on Twitter. People LOVE giving their opinions so I'm sure you'll get some feedback. You could try that on Facebook and Google+ as well.

The idea really is to get a group of fans who are interested in what you're writing about or posting on your site as well. Maybe it's tour dates, or posts about your concerts, but something that gets people interested enough to tweet and retweet.

Hope this helps a bit!

Jen

Hi Eric,

Open Site Explorer doesn't use Google at all, it uses our own crawl of the web which we call the Linkscape index. Hope that helps!

Jen

Hi! Yes, Google does seem to want people to use their personal gmail accounts when setting up Google+ pages. I'm not 100% sure of the benefit of this other than just being able to verify it's a real person. I actually have the SEOmoz account set up under my personal gmail account. Luckily, they have now opened it up so you can add more administrators. However, the other administrators of the account are all also using their personal gmail account.

I don't think they allow Google Apps or Business accounts to set up Google+ pages (I could be wrong here though). What I would suggest is to create a gmail account for the team/company and make sure it's a personal account. Use that as the original owner, then add additional administrators through their personal accounts. Unfortunately there's no getting around having to use a personal account at some point.

When you log in, you have the ability to change the profile you're in from your own, to the company's. I hope this helps!

Jen

I came into this post assuming I'd see a Mac vs PC fight... happy to see it didn't go that way. One tool I can think of that I think is PC only is Xenu linksleuth. Otherwise I've been able to find everything I need on the mac.

Jen

Hi Bill!

A couple of your questions that haven't been answered yet:

How do you do this and how do you know if it's already being done?

When you look at the code for a page, if you see a lot of code within tags, that means that the CSS is on the page rather than in an external file.

You can do the same with JavaScript. If there is a lot of code within the tags in the source code, you know there is JavaScript on the page instead of in an external file.

If it has not been done on a site is it hard to go back and do?

It is very simple to take this code, put it into an external file, then link to it like we do on this particular page's code:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="[/q/moz_nav_assets/stylesheets/production/all.css?0.4.25](view-source:http://www.seomoz.org/q/moz_nav_assets/stylesheets/production/all.css?0.4.25)" />

That is what it looks like when you link to a CSS external file.

If possible though, I'd definitely have someone who knows and understands the code help you out at first. There's nothing more infuriating that making what you think is a small change to a JavaScript file and it end up breaking the whole site.

Good luck! And I hope this helps a bit.

Hi Mark! Are you sure you just not getting personalized results? When I search, both logged in and logged out using different browsers, I see the Facebook page showing up 10th. Although when I run a search in the Rank Tracker tool it says it's #1. Odd.

In general though, I've seen Facebook pages rank rather highly if Google sees them as more relevant than the site. One thing I noticed though is that on the Facebook page, you don't have a link back to the site listed anywhere, like in your About section. Plus it looks like perhaps the FB site is rather new? (Since I'm not seeing much content) If so, it might be ranking well due to a "freshness" factor.

Hope this helps a bit!

If you're sole focus is on SEO and not necessarily on SMM, I agree with Robert, you probably want to spend more time on Google+. Rand just posted a blog post talking about the changes Google is making to the SERPs and why it's important to have a Google+ strategy: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-every-marketer-now-needs-a-google-strategy. I'd definitely check out the post and associated video.

When it comes to Facebook, be sure that you read the promotions guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php.

Personally though, while social is definitely an aspect of SEO now, it really does need to be considered as a whole strategy on it's own as well. If you're going to start using social sites, make sure you're dedicated to working on them and managing them.

Hope this helps!

Jen

Hi Cristian,

The numbers shown in OSE are pulled directly from APIs, and are not connected to the Linkscape index in any way. Also, I should note that the numbers shown only show the data for specific page you are looking at. They are not showing total FB shares, likes and Tweets, etc. for the entire domain. You can get more of that information for your client by using the Social tab inside of a campaign.

You can get more detailed information about the data used for the Social information in OSE here.

Hope that helps,

Jen

Dan is correct, the social data is not related to the Linkscape crawl at all. It is pulled directly from the APIs of Twitter and Facebook.

Have you changed your homepage drastically lately? When you look at the text version of your Google cache there are only a couple links in there. Did other links exist previously? Perhaps Google is taking them out because they no longer exist on your home page?

Both Aran and Keri have given great responses! One thing I want to add about using FB comments, is that I believe that you lose all your previous comments once the FB comments are implemented. But perhaps Aran can verify that. One post I always refer to on the subject is this one from Jon Henshaw over at Raven: http://raventools.com/blog/facebook-comments/. Not only is the post helpful, but the discussion in the comments is valuable as well. I'd definitely give it a read.

I agree with Keri that while it can be frustrating to see more comments on FB than on the blog. But at the same time remember, you're not just building a blog, you're creating a community. Some members of the community are simply more comfortable using FB than they are commenting on the site. Since your site has such a wide reach, I could see my mom wanting to comment but only understanding how to do that on FB, so that's where she'd do it. It takes more work to moderate comments on both the blog and on FB and perhaps Twitter and anywhere else for that matter. But people are actively talking about your "brand" and getting your name out there.

Please let me know if you have more questions!

Jen

I also like the idea of adding the like button to your site. Don't forget that you can get Facebook Insights for your site as well! I wrote a post earlier in the  year that talks about how to set it up: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about. This gives you access to data regarding what people are sharing and liking on YOUR site as opposed to what's happening on your FB page.

Hope this helps!

Jen