I was dumbfounded they were teaching about social networking in college when most all schools aren’t even teaching search engine optimization and the ones that do teach it aren’t teaching the best practices. My undergraduate degree was in Digital Media where we learned a lot about web design, animation, and accessibility so SEO did come up during our discussions. One teacher took 45 minutes to go over search engine optimization on Websites. Some of his recommendations included hiding keywords with the same color text as background, stuffing meta tags, and the typical spam stuff you’ve heard before. According to him, meta tags were one of the biggest things search engines looked at. I kept my mouth shut with a big shit eating grin on my face the whole time.

Social Media on TV

It’s amazing to see social networking going so mainstream. The other night on The Office they were talking about how they were making their Website “2.0″ and having a community on there to interact with each other. Unfortunately they faced the conundrum of pedophiles on the site…haha.

Social Networking Exam

Back to the exam…I am very impressed in the content of the exam. In addition to the exam, the teacher had assigned them to join, explore, and recap on 3 social networks over the weekend. My sister let me have a copy of the study guide so here it is:

COMM 1500

1. A ______ is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission, (epidemiology), or airline routes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
2. What is social networking trying to do? Most of the applications so far offer one or more of eight features or functionalities. http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/08/15/social_networking_a_status_report.html
3. Lots of people have opinion about Twitter, ranging from a complete waste of time to the indispensable connector with your community. What is Twitter? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter or http://twitter.com/
4. What is an RSS feed? http://www.fastcompany.com/about/rss.html and http://www.whatisrss.com/
5. They use video and paper to make complex ideas easy to understand. They present subjects “in plain English” using short, unique and understandable videos in a format called Paperworks. http://www.commoncraft.com/
6. Be familiar with the following Social Networks:

• iLike - http://ilike.com
• MySpace - http://www.myspace.com
• Facebook - http://www.facebook.com
• YouTube - http://www.youtube.com
• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com

Final Thought:

As you can see the exam looks pretty rudimentary and brief but a great step in the right direction to open up the world to social networking and social media Websites.

I realize there may be quite a bit of overlap in these lists so please consider that. Do you have a resource that I missed? Email me and I’ll add it to the list.

General | Digg | StumbleUpon | Del.icio.us | Flickr | Twitter | YouTube

General Social Media

Social Bookmark Tools

List of Social Bookmark sites

40+ Social News Websites

50 Top Niche Social Media Sites, and Their Power Accounts

Analysis What Type of Content Is Most Popular On Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon

Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18

Joe Whyte’s list of social media sites by category

OnlyWire, SocialPoster, SocialMarker, PostToaster - Mass Social Bookmark Submission

50+ Social Bookmarking and Social News Sites

120 Social Bookmarking site by PageRank

40+ Social Search Engines

Ultimate Social Media Optimization List

Social Bookmarks Creator

Digg

Your Ultimate Digg Resource

Digg Toolbox

Amazing Digg Tools Collection

12 Must-Have Tools for Active Digg Users

Digg Tools - About.com

The Digg Toolbox: 70+ Digg-related Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials

380+ Digg-style Applications

Digg tools by Category

62 posts on how to squeeze the juice from Digg

Digg Demographics

Bury Recorder

Comment Spy

Digg Marketing Guide

Which Categories Make The Digg Home Page

Digg Stalker

Digg’s Top 1000 Users

Digg Friend Finder

Digg Suggest

Link Attraction Factor Title Check

Link Attraction Factor Keyword Tool

5 must-see Digg Tools

29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API

Top 10 Digg Tools to Enhance your Digg Experience

List of Digg Tools

Digg Noise Filter

Who’s Digging You?

Digg Alerter

WordWeb - A Digg Visualization

The Essential Digg Tools

SocialBlade - Digg Front Page Data

Digg Entourage

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon Buttons & Tools

StumbleUpon Tools from around the Web

The StumbleUpon Toolbox: 40+ Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials

10 Tools to StumbleUpon websites with ease

StumbleUpon Alerter

StumbleRank

Del.icio.us

Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection

Comprehensive Listing of Del.icio.us Tools, Plugins and Add-ons for Social Bookmarking

Del.icio.us Toolbox: 180+ Tools and Resources

Del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions : All 150+ hacks

Essential Del.icio.us Tools

Flickr

100+ Flickr Resources

80+ Useful Tools for Flickr

Tools for Flickr

Flickr Bits and Pieces

The Great Flickr Tools Collection

Compfight - Flickr Search Tool

Flickr Tools

Flickr Photo Comment Tool

The Ultimate Flickr Tools, Scripts, and Hacks Database

Twitter

Follow Twitter Conversations

TerraMinds Twitter Search

Tweeter Board

Twitter Meter

Twitter Buzz

Visualizing Twitter

Tweet Volume

Tweet Stats

Tweet Scan

Twitter Toolbox: 60+ Twitter Tools

5 Twitter Tools We Love

5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter

10 Best Twitter Tools for Wordpress Blogs

All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools Collection

Twitter Tools, Tweaks, and Theories

My Essential Twitter Tools

8 Cool Twitter Tools

More Twitter Tools

Twitter Tips - Tools for your Tweets

Twitter Groups

Twitter Tools by SEOWife

YouTube

The Amazing YouTube Tools Collection

4 YouTube Tools you probably didn’t know about

TubeSpy

**UPDATE** Sphinn didn’t like the idea of offering these on CafePress through me so hope to help them get their own store started soon.

Side Note

The Poetic Prophet (SEO Rapper) has a new SEO rap out about Design Coding. Check it out!

According to statistics from the Omniture Summit, which I was unable to attend, there will be 8 billion dollars of ad spend on social networking this year. This is a 75% increase from last year 2007. By 2011, 12% of ad spend will be completely devoted to social networks and social media channels. So what does this mean for you? Well it’s kind of an eye-opener to see where the industry is headed. Blogging alone won’t give you the pervasive coverage you need to make your voice heard. A rich mix of multimedia is pertinent to provide enhanced content to your audience.

Understanding Your Audience

Before even beginning to outline a strategy for your social media marketing deployment you must really understand your audience. This is easier said than done. We hear a lot of marketers preach about understanding you audience and understanding your community but how exactly do you do that? Well, if you don’t have thousands to throw at in-depth demographic research there’s a few things you can do.

• Do some surface level demographic research with tools like Microsoft’s adCenter Labs and Quantcast to profile audiences that visit certain sites or are searching for certain keyphrases.
• Conduct some brief surveys. The strategic deployment of this will be highly contingent upon your industry.
• Use gut intuition. Personas are also a great way to classify stereotypical viewers of your media to taylor your message to them.

Different Multimedia Platforms

You might be wondering which form of multimedia you should be utilizing the most. I believe it was the CEO of Podango who was speaking when he layed out a pretty good rule of thumb. “Blog everyday, podcast every week, vidcast once a month.” The point is you need a good blend of media to really establish an audience from all different channels and platforms that have all different needs and desires.

The Impact of Multimedia on Search Engine Optimization

With Google’s Universal Search being such a large part of the search engine result pages (SERPs) it’s important that you have enhance media on your site to try to dominate some of the verticles that appear in blended search such as YouTube. This will allow you to own the SERPs while bringing in more traffic to your site.

The Impact of Multimedia on Social Media Marketing

Social Media thrives off audio, video, and imagery in additional to traditional copy. If all you’re doing is blogging you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. I’m not going to get into the four dominant personality types you need to be targeting but I will say that some of them respond differently to the same message in different format. If you really want to get all cylinders pumping then you need to outline a marketing strategy that’s transparent, pervasive, scalable, and robust.

Taking Shortcuts with Vidcasting and Podcasting

Between your families, work, hobbies, social network participation, school, reading, and learning I know the last thing you have time for is full blown multimedia production, right? Well rest asure there are a few shortcuts. For example, Buzzbooster.com was telling me about a service that submits your online video to 45 different social media channels and strips your audio and submits it in podcast format to a whole bunch of others. So you’re actually getting killing two birds with one stone but unfortunately I can’t remember the name of it. However, TubeMogul.com is similar one that is free and sends out to 23 different social media channels. In additional, there are services like CastingWords that transcribe your audio or video into text so you can post it in blog format and search engine optimize it.

Monetizing Multimedia

So you’ve done all this hardwork, have a big audience, now what? There are additional ways to monetize your media. Some ways are through:

• paid subscriptions
• paid sponsorships
• lead generation

One point made was that Web users have been trained to expect content for free so paid subscriptions are often times harder to push. You can find paid sponsors but unless you have a massive subscriber base and audience then most companies won’t be interested in forking out the big bucks. There are residual benefits through branding and lead generation which requires an additional marketing strategy to meet your goals in these areas.

One Size Does Not Fit All

When a lot of people thing of social video they think of YouTube. It was reinforced at PodCampSLC that YouTube is NOT an end all solution nore a outlet for the highest amount or best quality of traffic. Other channels like Revver and BlipTV can not only be easier to get your message across in but provide more qualified traffic all depending on your goals, niche, content, and industry. YouTube tends to be more focused on a younger audience while Gather.com tends to be more focused to adults 40+ years of age.

Summary

So in order to be a good Internet Marketer you really need to get out there. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a surefire one-way ticket to failure in the long-run. It’s also improtant to note that widespread multimedia is not the solution for EVERY client or industry either. The Web is changing everyday and it’s highly advisable to break out of your traditional habits and embrace the future to come.

The reason this is so important is because social media done wrong can have some costly mistakes as far as reputation, time, and money wasted. So shoot on over to Huomah.com and give it a read. Hopefully it’ll help you out in your future endeavours.

Now for the SEO/M world we have OG Charles Lewis (Chuck) also known as Poetic Prophet, from Pop Labs, droppin’ beats and putting a new “sphinn” on social media addiction, paid search, and link building. Chuck raps about search engine marketing techniques and social media as part of a daily lifestyle.

PRESS PLAY

His videos went up in November of ‘07 but I just barely discovered thems thanks to a Tweet from Muhammad Saleem followed by a Sphinn post from Danny Sullivan. While researching I saw that WebProNews.com had reported on this in November but apparently I missed it.

I love Chuck’s witty lyrics. He’s a guy who obviously knows what he’s doing. Here’s the lyrics to the link building rap video:

“You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement”

Check out Chuck’s YouTube Channel to see all of his videos.

Figuring out the best way to learn SEO is hard. You don’t know where to begin, who to trust, where to look, what to believe, or how to begin. I’m going to highlight how I started and a few things I’ve learned along the road to hopefully help you decide how you want to begin.

At the very beginning I was working as a Web designer and when times were slow I was mentored by an SEO professional, Jason Miller of EngineReady, to help create landing pages for certain clients. In this process I learned the ins and outs of on-page optimization. It wasn’t until a few year later did I decide to further my education in search engine optimization.

Not knowing where to begin, I dove into the deep end of the pool swimming in an overload of information from blogs and podcasts that I found via search. The frustration I dealt with was that often times author’s information contradicted what I had just read a few articles before. I spent weeks absorbing all the information I could then began implementing and testing different strategies.

Before long, I was figuring out what worked, what didn’t work, who the authoritative authors were and who to ignore. From that point forward I’ve spent approximately 10-12 hours a week keeping up on industry news and blog publishing to keep my education current.

I wish there had been an easier way, I spent months and months reading stuff I didn’t have to, that wasn’t accurate, that was untested or just heard through the grapevine. Now days I’ve heard about people spending hundreds of dollars on e-books and thousands of dollars on training courses to learn SEO so Garrett Pierson and I came up with a cheaper solution.

We wanted to be mentors to new people starting out, like Jason Miller was to me, and help them along to learn SEO step-by-step. We wanted to make it affordable so they wouldn’t have to spend thousands on training courses, months of their time sifting through garbage and fallacies on the Web, or hundreds on redundant e-books that only TELL you what you need to do to improve rankings and not SHOW you how to do it.

What Garrett and I do is walk you through screencast videos where we show you exactly the process needed to optimize a site from scratch. This includes all the keyword research, competitive analysis, tool usage, trade secrets, etc. If you want to sign up for our launch date then check us out at Learn SEO Live. Only $19 a month forever if you sign up now!

Learning SEO the RIGHT Way

An important thing to note is that every Website is different. What works on one site may not work on another. What worked yesterday may not work or work as well today. So the best thing to do, after learning the basics, is to begin testing yourself. Sure it’ll be a baptism by fire and you’ll make mistakes along the way and come across a few roadblocks

Make sure you seek out the reputation on background of the professionals that share their experiences and testing with you. Test results will vary for each Website, but there is a lot to be learned from others that can save you some costly mistakes.

So a summary of the key takeaways are:

• Reading and Research
• Conduct Testing
• Get Professional Training

To get started: check out the teleseminar podcast with Garret Pierson talking about our background, SEO tips, and more.

So without further adieu I bring to you the search world’s dynamic duo, Bill Slawski (SEObytheSea.com) and Kimberly Block (learningSEObasics.com) aka SpostareDuro. The scoop is Bill flew out to Virginia to see her recently and they had a marvelous time. Kimberly is now flying out to Deleware soon to visit. Congratulations to the both of you and I hope you have a successful and prosperous relationship together.

If these SEOs were to mate, below is what their “Super SEO” daughter might look like: (forgive the really bad Photoshop work)

+ =

Gone are the days where organic or paid listings were all you had to worry about. We now are in the times of Universal Search. Google coined the term Universal Search as it’s culmination of search methodologies. “It’s essentially the largest revision we’ve made in the past two or three years,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, tells TIME magazine. Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Ask have also implemented similar results into their organic listings. Some of the results you might find are:

1. Image Results
2. Online Video
3. New Results
4. Blog Listings / Results
5. Book Listings
6. PDFs
7. Local / GEO Search Listings
8. Traditional Web Search
9. Product Search
10. Catalog Search
11. Movie Search
12. Music Search
13. Map Search
14. Health Search
15. Celebrity Search
16. Job Search
17. Recipe Search
18. Financial / Stock Search
19. People Search
20. Comparison Search

What Does This Mean for Search Results?

Search results now are seen different by users. Eye tracking studies have been conducted by companies like Enquiro that track eye movement on search result pages. In the past, with Google search results, the hot spots of the search results page formulated an eye pattern of the letter “F”, also known as “The Golden Triangle,” that was positioned in the upper-left corner of the organic results. Now with Universal Search we have seen this pattern start to change. With thumbnailed images and video incorporated into the results, the “F” pattern has morphed into an “E” pattern. (SEE IMAGES BELOW)

This means Universal Search has had a dramatic impact on how we scan the page. With thumbnailed images being put in the limelight you might just steal that click away from the #1 positioned organic result if you have an enticing and relevant image. Have a sticky page for that user once they come to your site via Universal Search and you’re in. Typically, Google will keep a header bar on top of your page if they came through Google’s image search, but find some JavaScript to remove any framed bars from referring sites and you don’t have to worry about sacrificing aesthetics or your carefully crafted and positioned messages being pushed below the fold.

Are the Search Results More Relevant Now?

While that has yet to be determined, my humble opinion is “Yes.” It’s now easier to find what you’re looking for right off the bad. When conducting a search for “Britney Spears”, a fan may not be looking for informational articles or news but may be looking for enhanced media instead. Integrated YouTube music videos as well as thumbnailed images of Britney Spears combines the right mix of information, multimedia, and news results for that particular query.

Are Internet Marketers Taking Advantage of Universal Search?

Yes, but not as much as they should be. Internet marketers underestimate the traffic potential they can bring to their site by search engine optimizing their multimedia content. With proper naming conventions, accessibility attributes, and unique characteristics all embedded on a Web page with relevant content encompassing the enhanced media the traffic results can be well worth the efforts.

Not only do internet marketers now have to promote their Websites but they have to promote their content as well. In addition, links to images, videos, and syndication on various social platforms is the key to Universal Search success.

With this article in mind I got into a conversation with a great and well-respected Flash developer, Dan Decort, about Flash and the caveats it places on usability and search engine optimization. My problem with Flash is that the increased load times make for larger file sizes, longer waiting periods, inaccessible content, inability to bookmark, print or deep link, no screen reader and mobile device support, uncrawlable architecture, and overall problems with accessibility, usability, and SEO.

Sure, Google can crawl a limited amount of Flash now, but that’s just Google. Other search engines don’t have that technology implemented yet. I’m sure Google places less weight on Flash content due to the inaccessibility of it to other users. We started talking about technologies like SWFAddress and SEFFS that almost serve as a cloaking mechanism for Flash. SWFAddress does “address” some of these usability and accessibility issues but I’d still choose static/dynamic pages over Flash pages any day. Yes, if you’re serving the exact same content to search engines as embedded in your Flash movie then you should have the green light to go ahead and do so, but you might be looking at running the site through a spam filter with Google to check your site with a fine-toothed comb.

Aside from SEO, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this discussion. After my ranting and raving about Flash, Dan made the comment that user-experience is more important than usability, although he didn’t discredit usability. To define the difference for you:

• Usability - a property of websites (and other systems and products) that relates to ease of use. Usability is commonly defined as having three core components: effectiveness (how well a task can be completed), efficiency (how easy or quick it is to complete the task), and satisfaction (the user’s perception or opinion of the system).
• User-Experience - a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone

It’s important to note that usability and accessibility both DO contribute to the overall user-experience as well, but while user-experience is an important element of information design it really should be the icing on the cake not the foundation of the skyscraper. Usability is what drives conversion on a Website due to the efficiency in of usage, findability of desired content, and ability to navigate through site architecture with ease. Flash user-experience provides bells and whistles to be admired by people like myself and Dan, but your average user isn’t going to care about the feedback of the site (animation, graphics, sounds, actions) as much as he or she is going to care about information retrieval and timely satisfaction.

I invite you to join the oratory of our discussions and leave your feedback.