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Measure your social media efforts with UTM tags

Hanneke BeersMarch 3, 2020Yoast.com

Every company should have a social media strategy. It helps you to increase traffic to your website, it makes it easier to engage with (potential) customers and you’ll increase brand awareness. Of course, you want to see if your efforts pay off. Are you getting closer to the goals that you’ve set up in your strategy? Let’s take a look at how you can measure your social media efforts.

Ways to measure social efforts

If you spend your time writing social posts, creating images and more, you want to know if your social media strategy and your campaigns work. Of course, you can check Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Instagram Statistics. But the thing is, those show only a limited amount of information, mostly about what happens on that particular platform. If you’re doing fine with just the information that these platforms provide, of course, that’s great.

Perhaps, though, you want information about the relation between social media and the traffic to your site. That’s where UTM tagging comes in. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Google uses this method to track your URL so you can track custom campaigns in Google Analytics. In other words, it helps you to see whether a post or campaign on social media actually led to more traffic on your website.

Want to make sure your social posts look fabulous? The social preview feature in Yoast SEO Premium helps you with that. It visualizes what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or Twitter!

Using UTM tags

A UTM tag consists of parameters that will help you track back your URL and give you information. The UTM tag will always come after your URL when you share it on a social channel. So, you take the URL of a post and simply paste the UTM tag after the URL. By doing so, for instance, it could look like this:

https://yoast.com/measure-social-media-efforts/#utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=seo-post-social&utm_content=link&utm_term=measure-social

There are several websites that help you build a UTM tag, but it’s always nice to understand what you’re looking at. The UTM we use when sharing this post on Twitter, for example, is:

#utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=seo-post-social&utm_content=link&utm_term=measure-social

The source is mandatory. The other information, such as content and term, gives a more detailed explanation about the type of things you’re sharing on social media platforms. Make sure to be consistent in your tagging. If you mix uppercase and lowercase, Google Analytics will see it as two different types of tags. This means that data gets separated in Google Analytics. At Yoast, we use a # to start off the UTM tag, but most tools use a ?. We use the # because then we know for certain that we are not causing duplicate content since Google ignores anything after the #. So let’s break down this UTM tag, shall we?

The parameters

utm_source=twitter.com
The source explains where visitors are coming from. Because we’re sharing this post on Twitter, we’ll use twitter.com. For Facebook, we’ll use facebook.com. And so forth.

utm_medium=social
The medium explains what kind of medium is used (surprise, surprise). Twitter is a social media platform and Facebook is a social media platform, so we’ll use social. By grouping all social media platforms with the medium=social UTM tag, we can easily see in Google Analytics what all social traffic is doing for our site. This way, we can compare a post that’s been shared on all social media platforms to, for example, the same post shared in newsletters.

utm_campaign=seo-post-social
Where source and medium tell you more about where your visitors came from, the campaign tag tells you more about the subjects you’re sharing on, in this case, social. For instance, if you have a product launch or a sales campaign, you can use this UTM tag to track in Google Analytics how that specific campaign is doing. Your campaign is something you have to think about really well, as it has to cover everything you want to be covered. The one that we use for this post is the one that we use for all the daily blog posts that we share. If we share something, for example, that has to do with the Yoast Care fund we’ll use ‘utm_campaign=carefund’.

utm_content=link
The content piece describes what kind of content you’re sharing. You’re always sharing a link, that’s true. But if you’re sharing an image, your content will be utm_content=image… As the image will be the central point. (or video, gif, voice memo, whatever you’re planning on sharing!)

utm_term=measure-social
The utm_term tag is mostly used to add keywords for Google ads. That doesn’t mean you can’t use them for other things than ads. This tag can be used to add more information about the post you’re sharing on social platforms. For instance, the topic of the post you’re sharing or the date.

Make your own UTM

Once you get the hang of creating a UTM tag, you’ll do it with your eyes closed. But for now, it might still seem confusing. A good tool to use when you just start building your UTM tags is the Campaign URL Builder tool by Google Analytics. It’s important that you use the UTM tags in such a way that you can understand it and get the correct data from it in Google Analytics. It doesn’t matter if another company or website does it differently, as long as you know what your own UTM tag means. You have to find a way that works for you. In the image below, you’ll notice that the order of the parameters in the generated campaign URL differs from how we did it: This does not matter.

Campaign URL Builder by Google Analytics

Make sure that you save your campaigns somewhere, so that in the future, when you post something that’s related to the campaign, you can make sure you use the same one. Whenever we post a YoastCon 2020 related blog post or page, you’ll see we use &utm_campaign=yoastcon2020. Or for anything that’s related to the Yoast Care fund, we’ll use &utm_campaign=carefund.

Let’s measure your social media efforts!

Now, I can hear you thinking: ‘That’s all nice and stuff, but now what? Who will tell me if my social media posts are working?’ Well… You will! With the help of Google Analytics of course! In the video below, Annelieke, Lead of our Research team, explains how you can interpret your data and where you can find the information that you collected with the use of your UTM tags.

To find the relevant data in Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns. Here, you can find all the campaigns that you’ve set up an UTM tag for. In the search bar, you can search for more specific campaigns. Just type in the campaign name you want to learn more about! You’ll find information about the number of users that clicked on that campaign, the bounce rate and the conversion rate, for instance. Watch the video, for more options and a more detailed explanation.

Note: Facebook likes to mess things up with your self-made UTM tag that you put all your hard work in. Even though that’s not very nice of Facebook, you can still see where people went by looking at the landing page.

Now, it’s your turn!

Creating and measuring your UTM tags might be a little hard in the beginning. But, believe me, you’ll find a way to make it work for you. Take your time for both creating and measuring, and start with a campaign that you really want to be measured. If you’re still asking yourself: “But why should I… does social media even influence my SEO?” then I suggest you to read this post that’s answering that exact question and come back later. If you’re ready to start, then I wish you the best of luck!

What’s your favorite way to measure your social media efforts?

The post Measure your social media efforts with UTM tags appeared first on Yoast.

Does social media influence your SEO?

Siobhan CunninghamJanuary 17, 2020Yoast.com

Handling your social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but it’s also a vital part of any good SEO strategy. The popularity of social media has risen and probably will keep doing so. That means Google and other search engines can’t ignore them, and you probably shouldn’t either. You even see recent tweets popping up in search results now! So let’s discuss: how does social media influence SEO?

Customers are looking for you

SEO is about being found, so let’s start with the basics. If people are looking for you, make sure they find you! Customers that have heard about your brand might look for you on social media, or even through Google. As a professional company or brand, they expect you to be there. You don’t want them to come up empty, or worse: stumble on another business with a similar name while thinking it’s you. For that reason, it’s a good idea to claim your profiles. Even if you’re not planning on using the platform right now, you might want to in the future.

If you do register on a social platform and are not planning to actively maintain the profile, let your visitors know. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have the option to pin a tweet or post right at the top of your profile. In that post, explain that while you are not actively present there, they did find the right brand and yes, they can reach you. Point them to other means of communication, like email, make it easy for them! Another plus of claiming profiles: If in the future you do decide to start using a platform, you’re ready to go. Social media is ever-changing, so you never know if you might.

Setting up your social media accounts

When you register with social media platforms, do so seriously. Use a high-quality logo and fill out all the fields offered. If you have physical stores: add them, and their opening hours. A Google My Business account is especially valuable for this! In general, make sure your profiles look professional and up to date. And: be consistent. Use the same brand name across platforms, so people (and search engines!) know it’s you.

Social accounts showing in search results

Did you know that your social accounts can show up when people search for your brand name in search engines? For example, in Google’s Knowledge Panel. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

That looks professional, right? It adds trust as well because users have no doubt that if they click the profile buttons there, they’ll end up on your social account. Learn more: How to add social profiles to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Latest tweets in search results

What we think is really cool is how Google regularly show an account’s latest tweets, right up there between other search results. Here’s an example of a so-called tweet carousel that shows when you search Google for [yoast].

This is a great way to showcase your business and what you’re all about, while enticing people to visit your profile and follow you for more.

Claim your space in the search results

What’s also important: content like tweet carousels take up (way) more place in the search results! The same goes for your actual social accounts: they show up too. The more space you claim in the top search results, the more you push down other results. It definitely increases the chances of people clicking through to any of your places on the web!

More traffic to your website

Now you understand the actual benefits of claiming (and preferably regularly updating, but more on that in a later blog post) your social media accounts, how does that tie into your SEO strategy? The idea is quite simple: if people are talking about you, online or offline, you’re relevant. As you might know by now, that is what search engines are looking for: Google wants to present users with the most relevant results. They love serving up search results that they know others find interesting.

So if you offer awesome content on your website, why not spread it even further by referring to it in other places, like on Facebook? It’s your content so it’s yours to share. Help people discover you! By convincing people to click to find out more, read on, etc., your social media posts could seriously increase traffic to your website.

Brand awareness through social media

Having success in social media also increases brand awareness. If you’re sharing great content, people will connect that positive experience to your brand name and experience. They might share your content or even just ‘like’ it. Either way, they’re helping you reach a new audience. Social media algorithms like content that other people like, they’ll help spread it further. Now, if these new people see and enjoy your content, they might start following you! They’ll get to know you and your products, services, or whatever it is you want them to know about.

Social media and SEO

Wrapping up: we wouldn’t say that just the fact that you are on social media has a direct impact on rankings. But, as with many ranking factors, it can help indirectly. An increased brand awareness, more traffic, people enjoying your content, all of those could help your website’s success.

So you know that it can pay off to use social media for your brand. But one of the hardest, if not the hardest, things of social media is: what do you ‘do’ on them? What kind of content are you supposed to share? How do you make a social media plan for your business or blog? How much time will it take? Is it worth it? We’ll cover setting up a social media strategy in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned!

The post Does social media influence your SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

How to use Twitter Cards

Jimmy ComackJune 17, 2017Yoast.com

Back in 2012, Twitter introduced a system called Twitter Cards which allows site owners to display enhanced tweets on their websites using a syntax very similar to that of OpenGraph. Thanks to this new system, Twitter can show nicer looking tweets, including ones containing media such as images, audio and video.

How does it work?

As mentioned in the introduction, Twitter Cards make use of a very similar syntax to that of OpenGraph. Twitter has some properties that are specific for their platform which you can see in the following snippet:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@yoast"/>
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@michielheijmans"/>

The twitter:card property is required and defines the type of card you want to show. You have four flavors here: summary, summary_large_image, app and player. What the difference is between all these different cards can be found in the documentation.

Both twitter:site and twitter:creator are optional and point to the Twitter account of the website publishing the content and the author.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

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OpenGraph

When it comes to parsing URLs, images and descriptions, Twitter makes use of existing og: properties. You can overwrite these og: properties with Twitter specific ones, but most of the time this isn’t something you’d want. If your goal is to display completely different information on Twitter, then these tags allow you to override default behavior.

There’s one thing to take into account when using both the Twitter and OpenGraph options. Twitter uses name to specify the attribute whereas OpenGraph makes use of the property attribute. Take this into account if you plan on manually implementing Twitter Cards.

Implementing Twitter Cards

As with other meta tags, you need to add the Twitter tags in the <head> of your website and ensure that the values are set properly on a per-page basis. This can quickly becomes an unwieldy task for a blog, so we built a feature that generates the proper meta tags for you.

Twitter Card input field in Yoast SEO

Want to change the look of the Twitter Card for a specific post or page? Just use the form on the Social tab. Here you can tweak specific properties to your liking.

Additionally, our Premium plugin contains Social Previews which display what the Twitter Card will eventually look like based on the current page or post:

Twitter Card: Preview your Twitter post with Yoast SEO Premium

Twitter Cards are a great (visual) addition and can help increase traffic to your website!

SEO basics: How to use social media

Marieke van de RaktMarch 25, 2017Yoast.com

Social media endeavors should be a part of your SEO strategy. As social media usage increased in popularity, Google and other search engines couldn’t ignore them any longer. This means that your site’s popularity on social media ties in with your SEO more and more. The reason for this is simple: if people talk about you, online or offline, you’re relevant to the topic at hand. In addition to that, you’ll want to know about these conversations. In this post, I’ll give you some fundamental tips on how to use social media.

How to use social media

Below are some tips you can use in order to set up or to improve your social media strategy:

1. Keep your account alive

The most crucial advice in the use of social media is that you need to keep your account ‘alive’. Make sure you post on a regular basis. Sharing your new blog posts is a good start, but also let people know what you’re working on or what interests you. If you go on vacation, schedule posts for the time you are away, or at least let people know when you’ll be back. And, after a while, you could repost older content to draw people to your website with existing content.

2. Write captivating excerpts

When you decide to share your blog post on social media, make sure to select or write a short and appealing excerpt in order to draw people in. You could, for instance, choose the most important sentence or the main point of your post. Or you could simply choose to share the introduction of the blog post, if you feel that is captivating enough. You want this piece of text to get people to click on the link and read the whole post. And do ensure that people can easily navigate to other pages on your website, once they are there.

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3. Diversify

You can share different types of posts on your social media account. As mentioned in point 1, you could share your blog posts, but you could also share short news items, videos or simply some (behind-the-scenes) pictures. These kind of posts can make our brand more fun and personal.

In order to decide which posts do well on social media, you should analyze the number of views, shares and likes. Of course, we’d advise to share types of posts that receive a lot of views and likes more often.

4. Handle comments

If you share your posts on social media, you could also receive comments. Don’t forget to monitor this. You should handle these comments swiftly.

5. Use awesome illustrations

For some social media (Pinterest and Instagram) it is all about the illustrations. But also on Facebook visual content is really important. They make your post stand out from all of the other posts in someone’s timeline, and can boost clickthrough.

When you use Yoast SEO Premium you can check what your blog post or product page will look like, before sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. See how easy that is!

6. Be part of the community

If you’re active in a certain community or niche, you’ll soon discover other interesting people in that area that your audience follows. Follow them too and interact with them, this could help your and their audiences grow.

7. Add metadata

Smart use of (hash)tags can also help your growth immensely. For instance if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event in your post, so everyone searching for that event will come across it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology. Some people might even retweet everything that is posted in a certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of random hashtags.

Conclusion

Social media is a key aspect of every SEO strategy. Setting up a decent social media strategy can be hard and will ask for a bit of creativity. And, it’ll definitely consume much of your time. But, it’ll be worth it! And if you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in many aspects.

Keep reading: ‘Social media strategy: where to begin’ »

Social buttons: How to add and track them on your site

Jimmy ComackMarch 24, 2017July 12, 2019Yoast.com

To help your blog gain more readers, you can make use of social buttons which allow your current readers to share interesting posts on their social media accounts. But how should you go about implementing them? In this post, we’ll give you some pointers on how to get started.

Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about social media and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-Around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!

What are social buttons?

For those who don’t know what social buttons are: They’re the buttons that you’ve seen around the internet that are usually placed somewhere below a blog post that allow readers to share articles on various social media platforms. They can help with gaining extra exposure and thus also getting more traffic to your website.

Here’s an example of a few social buttons:

How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?

Now you might be wondering about how you can implement these buttons. Your initial thought might be that it’s easiest to add them with some kind of plugin. However, you could also add it to your theme. This gives you extra control over how to style and display things. Of course, you can also decide to add these buttons to a plugin, but the added benefit would be minimal.

An option is to place the code for the social buttons in a template partial. This way, you can easily embed it throughout the website without having to drastically edit template files or having to embed the buttons manually per post.

Here’s a basic example of how you can implement a social button for Facebook. Note that not all the code is actual production code and has been replaced with pseudo-code to make implementation easier to understand.

<?php
// File: <theme_folder>/html_includes/partials/social-share.php
function facebook_social_button() {
	$article_url = get_article_url(); // Psuedo-code method to retrieve the article's URL.
	$article_url .= '#utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social_buttons';
	$title       = html_entity_decode( get_og_title() ); // Psuedo-code method to retrieve the og_title.
	$description = html_entity_decode( get_og_description() ); // Psuedo-code method to retrieve the og_description.
	$og_image    = get_og_image(); // Psuedo-code method to retrieve the og_image assigned to a post.
	$images      = $og_image->get_images();
	$url         = 'http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?s=100';
	$url         .= '&p[url]=' . urlencode( $article_url );
	$url         .= '&p[title]=' . urlencode( $title );
	$url         .= '&p[images][0]=' . urlencode( $images[0] );
	$url         .= '&p[summary]=' . urlencode( $description );
	$url         .= '&u=' . urlencode( $article_url );
	$url         .= '&t=' . urlencode( $title );
	
	echo esc_attr( $url );
}

?>

<div id="social-share">
    <div class="socialbox">
        <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" data-name="facebook" aria-label="Share on Facebook" data-action="share"
           href="<?php facebook_social_button(); ?>"> <i class="fa fa-facebook-square text-icon--facebook"></i> </a>
    </div>
</div>

The above code could be used similarly for other social media platforms, but it can vary greatly in terms of URL structure. We advise having a look at the documentation of your desired platforms to ensure compatibility.

To include these social buttons in your blog posts, open up single.php in your theme’s folder and paste the following snippet where you want the buttons to appear:

<?php get_template_part( 'html_includes/partials/social-share' ); ?>

That’s it! If you don’t want to collect interaction data from these buttons, then this is all you need. If you want interactions to be tracked, then read on.

Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons

Having nicely styled social buttons on your website is one thing, but tracking the actual interactions with them would be even better. You can use JavaScript to ensure the tracking of social media sharing is done correctly, so you can easily see what social media platforms are popular among your readers.

The code for this is relatively simple and depends on the Google Analytics Tracker being properly implemented into your website. Assuming this is the case, the following code will be of great help:

jQuery( document ).ready( function( $ ) { $( '.socialbox a' ).click( function( e ) { e.preventDefault(); if ( typeof __gaTracker !== "undefined" ) { __gaTracker( 'send', 'social', $( this ).data( 'name' ), $( this ).data( 'action' ), document.querySelector( "link[rel='canonical']" ).getAttribute( "href" ) ); } }); });

The above JavaScript snippet passes in some of the extra information passed along to the anchor tag. This extra information can be identified by the data- prefix and is retrieved by calling $( this ).data( [...] ). This method allows you to extend the social-share div and add more buttons easily.

If you want more information on how Google tracks this information, you can read about it here.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s not very difficult to add social buttons to your blog. Even tracking them in Google Analytics has become a breeze compared to past implementations.

All that’s left is to go and implement the buttons and allow your readers to help promote your posts. Good luck!

The post Social buttons: How to add and track them on your site appeared first on Yoast.

Metadata and SEO part 3: social, internationalization and more

Michiel HeijmansMarch 16, 2017Yoast.com

Literally, metadata is data that says something about other data. You can use particular metadata to send information about a webpage to a search engine or a social media channel, and thereby improve your SEO. In the first two posts of this metadata series, we discussed meta tags in headof your site and link rel metadata. In this last episode, we’ll scrutinize on metadata that can improve the sharing experience on social media. And last, but definitely not least, we’ll describe why metadata likehreflang declarations are a necessity if your business serves multiple languages and/or countries.

Posts in this series

Metadata #1: meta tags in the head

Metadata #2: link rel metadata

Metadata #3: Social and international

Social metadata

We have written about Open Graph and Twitter Cards before. These tags, or this information, is definitely metadata. It will help you tell social networks like Facebook and Twitter what the page at hand is about in an orderly, summarized way. It will allow you to control the way your articles or pages are shared.

OpenGraph

OpenGraph is a standard used by a number of social networks like Facebook and Pinterest. If you’re using our Yoast SEO plugin, these tags are added to your page automatically, and of course, you can control the contents of these OpenGraph tags (in the social section in our meta box below on edit pages).

Twitter Cards

The same goes for Twitter Cards. They add metadata to your pages that are convenient for Twitter to read and understand. Our plugin adds Twitter Card metadata as well. If there is no Twitter Card data, Twitter will fallback to OpenGraph data, but you obviously want to make things as simple as possible for that Twitter.

If you’d like a preview of how your page, shared on either Twitter or Facebook would look like, please check our Yoast SEO premium plugin, as that one adds these social previews right in your WordPress backend.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

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But wait, there is more important metadata!

If you thought that all the things previously mentioned are all the SEO related metadata for your website, think again.

`hreflang` tags to indicate other languages

For those of you that have multilingual sites, this one is really, really important. If you have a site or page that is served in more than one language, be sure to add hreflang tags to your page.

With hreflang tags, you can indicate the language variations of the page at hand. That looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" 
      hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb/" 
      hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/de/" 
      hreflang="de" />

As you can see, these can be used for variations of the ‘same’ language as well, like the British English in the second line. Note that hreflang isn’t a substitute for the rel=canonical we discussed. Be safe, implement both. More information on how to implement hreflang can be found here.

Alt tags

If you think about it, any extra attribute you assign to an image, like the alt or title tag, is metadata. Google uses it to scan the page and see what’s on there, so be sure to add these alt and title tags and optimize ’em.

Microdata for breadcrumbs

For a better understanding of your site’s structure, you should add some kind of microdata to your breadcrumbs. That can be done by adding schema.org data for breadcrumbs, for instance by JSON-LD. RDFa is another option to add this type of metadata to your website. Again, install Yoast SEO for WordPress and this is taken care of.

Language declaration for the page at hand

Let’s wrap this long list of metadata up with another language related metadata element. At the very top of your HTML, we find the, indeed, html tag. This one wraps all the code of your <head> and <body> and can contain the language of the page at hand. That is done like this:

<html lang="en">

Makes sense, right. Some might say that adding a meta tag for Content-Language is also an option, but following the W3C guidelines, that meta tag should not be used anymore. Use the lang declaration in the html tag instead.

That concludes this series with a lengthy list of metadata you can use to tweak your SEO. I am confident you can come up with even more metadata, as there is plenty. Feel free to leave your additions in the comments!

Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium

Joost de ValkMay 4, 2016September 7, 2019Yoast.com

Social previews in Yoast SEO visualize what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or Twitter. You can see right away if your image fits and whether your title and description will display well. It works much like the snippet preview people have come so used to. As the snippet preview does for search rankings, we think social previews will improve your social workflow.

Which image will Facebook pick?

When you publish a post and you haven’t specifically selected a Facebook image in our plugin, you don’t know which picture Facebook will use. Yoast SEO has a big hand in this process: it determines which images it “gives” Facebook with its metadata. When you specify a Facebook image, it specifies just that image. When you set a featured image for your post, that’s the image it will feed to Facebook. If you have no featured image either, it will grab the images from your post. Our social previews take the guesswork away and show you what Facebook will use.

It looks like this for this post (because I haven’t specified a specific Facebook image yet):

Facebook preview of this social previews article, showing the featured image and the meta description being used — Social image before specifying a specific Facebook image

As you can see this allows me to preview what my post will look like when shared on Facebook. We have a similar preview for Twitter. Both previews also have edit fields below them, allowing you to change the individual Facebook and Twitter metadata. That looks like this:

Social metadata fallbacks in social previews

As you can see in the image above, you can upload a specific Twitter image. The one you’re seeing in the preview is the Facebook image I uploaded. If you only specify a Facebook image, Twitter will use that image too, which often works just fine. The description underneath that actually comes from the meta description.

Social networks all need similar data. All of them seem to fall back to Facebook OpenGraph data when no specific data was specified. Twitter and Pinterest also use Facebook OpenGraph metadata. WhatsApp uses OpenGraph too when sharing URLs in the messaging app. This is why Facebook OpenGraph is such an important part of our plugin. The previews will show you exactly what’s being used and what your post will look like.

The post Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium appeared first on Yoast.

Twitter Analytics: stats for your tweets

Michiel HeijmansOctober 29, 2015Yoast.com

Setting up your website is step one, promoting it is step two. The basis of that should be great content, and social media is your handy, free platform for this (next to all the great links you have gathered for your site, of course).

Social media, for us, is focused on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll guide you over the analytics pages of these platforms. Thijs already wrote about setting up a strategy and picking an audience, these next posts will focus on what stats and extra information these platforms themselves provide. Much like the Webmaster Tools series we did last year. This post is about Twitter Analytics.

Tip: open your Twitter Analytics so we can guide you through the most useful stats!

Twitter Analytics dashboard

You can find your Twitter Analytics dashboard at analytics.twitter.com. It starts with a summary of the last 28 days:

How does this help? The large numbers are nice, but what really is helpful is the percentage next to these numbers. How did your numbers change compared to the previous 28 days. Audience (‘tweet impressions’) went up a lot in this case, which might have been triggered by the start of our Yoast Academy’s Basic SEO Training. Looking at profile visits, the drop isn’t that important to analyze, as personally, I could not care less, and more important, the numbers of followers shows a steadily increasing number, also indicated by the small graph below the numbers.

The 28 day summary is a quick overview, and the trend is more important than the numbers.

This month in Twitter Analytics

I like the second section a lot more. Twitter Analytics shows all kind of details about your tweets and following. Here’s what Twitter Analytics tells us about last month:

Now I have to be honest: this dashboard is a nice magazine-style summary of incidences. This tells me just about nothing. It’s what’s beneath all these instances what matters. Every section in that screenshot has a ‘View [something]’ link to all the good stuff.

Tweet activity

The ‘View all Tweet activity’ link in Twitter Analytics brings you to a nice overview per period. You can see the number of tweets per day, and the impressions:

Right below that graph, you’ll find details per tweet, like your most engaging tweet:

If you’re goal is to build your audience, ‘Tweets & replies’ gives you a nice overview of what happens in terms of replies and favorites. Clicking the tweet itself gives you some more information as well:

I think the ‘Detail expands’ is an interesting number. Probably depending on the Twitter client, right. And should we call that engagement already?

‘Favorites’ is another number that has become fuzzy for me over the past year or so, as I know quite a few people that use the Twitter favorite option to trigger IFTTT scripts to add the tweet to Buffer for sharing it on their own timeline as well. I might just made that number even fuzzier, if I have given you an idea :)

Audience Insights

Although I think ‘Audiences’ is a very interesting section, it has a basis in how much Twitter knows about all of us. You might question the figures here, obviously. But when our Audience insights in Twitter Analytics shows me this overview below, I think they know quite a bit about us all:

Our followers are mostly interested in Technology, communicate in English, are Online buyers and Ethnic explorers. OK, that last one confused me a bit. Apparently, these are people that have a wide range of international foods on their shopping lists. I’m glad Twitter provides handy mouse-overs:

Not sure I’m glad they used this kind of segmentation, as that tells me little about our business.

You can also see what percentage is male of female, household income, net worth and if people are married. If and what education they have, and if they are home owners or not. Not sure how reliable these figures are, as mentioned.

There is also a list of wireless carriers on this tab – anyone using that list for any purpose? That one seems to be added for the sole reason that this data was available. I think Twitter is a bit off with this one. All the rest on this page is related to the audience, carrier is related to technology, IMHO.

This one seems tricky as well: on the ‘Lifestyle’ tab, Twitter Analytics tells me the political party affiliation. I wouldn’t base my tweets on that graph. I am sure there is a nice complicated algorithm calculating this, but it seems hard to be spot on with this one. Again, it might help you find a trend in this, though.

Twitter ups its game on the ‘Customer behavior’ tab: it shows the number of VISA and MasterCard users, Aftermarket auto buyer types, and even what percentage of your followers buys cheese. Infotainment? It feels like this is it.

However, there is an interesting bit of information hidden on the ‘Mobile footprint’ tab:

If you are linking your site’s articles on your Twitter timeline, this is actually valuable information. And I understand that this information can be obtained easily. If the majority of your Twitter visitors is using Android devices, and these click to your website from Twitter, test your website on Android. A responsive website should take care of this, obviously.

Card Analytics

I saved this one for last. Following my post on optimizing product pages using Open Graph and Twitter Cards, this section is all about that last one.

Twitter actually provides nice insights on how your cards are doing:

That’s just a quick overview. The rest of the page is even more interesting:

There is a trend graph to indicate how much Twitter Cards affected impression and clicks. Twitter Cards make all the difference. Just check your own stats and see. To me, it means investing in things like illustrations or great photography for your posts and thus tweets pays off. There is a reason we hired an additional illustrator recently. That also goes for Facebook, by the way. We see a lot more engagement on posts that have illustrations compared to those that don’t.
Twitter Analytics also shows what type of card works best for improving clicks. Twitter Analytics compared ‘everyone’s cards’ to ‘your cards’. The Player Card seems to perform best for everyone. Number two and three are summary cards (with or without image). These can both be added to your website using Yoast SEO for WordPress. Be sure to add these cards.
There is a nice overview of the links that performed best:
There is an influencers overview. As Twitter puts it: “Find out which accounts are already impacting traffic to your website and start a conversation with them.” Cindy, Neil and Michael, thanks for tweeting / replying / mentioning us. Appreciated.
New wine in old bags. If one of your tweets performs above average, you might consider retweeting them. Twitter shows you a nice overview of the tweets that drove the most clicks.
Finally, and perhaps oddly, we find an overview of the sources our influencers used to send tweets. Loads of you are using Hootsuite (we are for team collaboration, by the way), and too little are using Tweetbot (which I use personally). Both also come with their own overview of twitter analytics.

Note that all the data that is available for URL clicks, is also available for your retweets. Talking about Twitter Cards, the Photo Card seems to help retweets as well, for instance.

Be sure to check regularly

I think this article covers Twitter Analytics for now. Be sure to check these stats regularly and see what changes. See what tweets perform best and if you are still roughly reaching the audience you are looking for. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are getting more and more intelligent and I expect data to be become more valid and trustworthy in a fast pace.

As always, be sure to drop your two cents in the comments below. Let me know if I missed anything, our readers will thank you for even more insights!

Weekly SEO Recap: Newsflash!

Joost de ValkJuly 18, 2015Yoast.com

I’m a bit feisty this week. I apologize upfront. We’ve been doing tons of website reviews after last month’s sale and it had me quite busy. But there’s good news this week if you’re looking for a job as an SEO: here’s your chance! Google is hiring one. SEO’s all over the web had fun with that this week, but it shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The only thing Google just did is acknowledge that SEO is worth doing. So much that they hire people to be in charge of it. Luckily, there was more!

Twitter blocking robots? Guess not.

There was quite a bit of fuzz on Twitter the last few days about Twitter blocking robots.txt and how bad this was:

Please note that Twitter has blocked ALL ROBOTS ACCESS TO TWITTER. https://t.co/Cv98odmk21 This means wayback will lose it.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) July 16, 2015

Luckily my buddy Martin MacDonald looked for two more seconds and discovered this wasn’t exactly the case. Why Twitter doesn’t just 301 redirect www.twitter.com to twitter.com is completely beyond me. That would be the only real SEO solution in my (not so) humble opinion.

Penguin is months away

In not so surprising news (as it’s bloody hot here and penguins aren’t known for their love of heat), Google’s Penguin update apparently is months away as they are “working on making it real time”. We’ll see.

Google sends notifications, then wonders why

In another not so surprising move, Google is starting to realize that some messages are not making much sense to each site owner. They send out a ton of hreflang messages this week, only to realize not everyone might be interested. So now they’re asking for your feedback on how you like the messaging coming out of Google Search Console.

Lots of us would probably rather have them fix issues like the current issue with index numbers. And maybe help their colleagues on fixing the referral spam in Google Analytics.

Flash is dead, bye bye!

Firefox is now blocking Flash by default. Flash was always a stupid idea, but in the off chance that you’re still using it on your site, you probably should stop for real now. I mean, we have animated GIFs for annoying content!

XML Sitemaps are hard

Gary Ilyes from Google tweeted about how to properly format the last modified time in XML sitemaps:

How to properly format last modified (lastmod) time for xml sitemaps http://t.co/7wQ3g7799E

— Gary Illyes (@methode) July 13, 2015

His answer also states “in most of the cases it’s ignored by search engines”. We knew that, but it doesn’t hurt repeating it. The same is true for the priority field, which is the reasons our Yoast SEO plugin doesn’t have a ton of interface to change them. They simply don’t matter that much.

That’s it, see you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Newsflash! on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

3300+ Words Worth of Non-Obvious Marketing Tactics That Work

Karol K.August 9, 2014Online Business Advice

Shhh! …

What follows is something you surely haven’t heard before! In order to truly grow your business you need to:

Step #1

Step #2

Step #3

Step #4

Step #5

Okay okay, just kidding. These – and similar ideas – have truly been beaten down to death on the web as it is. Really, how much Facebook marketing advice does the world need?

But I digress, so let’s get back on track!

… scroll down for 14 non-obvious marketing tactics that work …

What I have for you here is a set of marketing tactics that are hopefully not that obvious. (Although, it’s very likely that you’ve heard of some of them before.) But what’s more important is that not all of them come from me.

I’ve been kind of fascinated with this topic lately. So I’ve decided to do a bit more research and find some truly inspiring stuff, which I can then expand upon and share here. So, the ideas themselves are something I’ve stolen from the likes of Neil Patel, Forbes magazine, Jeremy Clarkson, John Jantsch, and a bunch of other people.

1. Be a true-blood guy (or gal)

Everyone’s way too nice on the web these days if you ask me!

No, wait. This doesn’t sound right.

Anyway, what I mean is that there’s a general belief circulating around that we should always be nice to all people (no matter what they say about us) and that if we have a critical – yet not fact-based – opinion, we should keep it to ourselves.

Bollocks.

This works against the one thing we probably all want to achieve – getting our personal brand across.

For the life of me, I can’t remember who said it, but it was something to the tune of:

‘People come for information, they stay for personality.’ – Who said this?
Click To Tweet

And the problem is that if you want to be all things to all people, you will probably end up attracting no one.

Jeremy Clarkson (twitter) is a great example here. He’s built the popularity of his show – Top Gear – to a worldwide phenomenon. Do people watch it for the cars? Sure, some of them do. But most of them watch it because it’s incredibly entertaining, and cars just play a supporting role (Oscar worthy role, but still).

For example, here’s what he once said about Sarah Jessica Parker:

“People think ‘oh she must be pretty, she’s on television’. She isn’t – she looks like a boiled horse.

Did he offend some people? Probably so. Did he make thousands of people around the world laugh? For sure.

So what I’m trying to convey is this: Be real. If you want to say something, say it. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

More cool resources just like this in your inbox.
Let’s grow our businesses together!

2. Create products and give them away for free

I should clarify. If you’re in the physical products business then it’s probably more difficult to give those away for free. Like, for example, giving away shoes or refrigerators. But in the digital market, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.

Let’s take a look at what happened with Quick Sprout a while ago. Previously, the site’s homepage was the blog (I think). Now, there’s an online SEO tool.

Neil – the founder of the site – said that the tool cost him $100,000, yet he decided to make it available for free.

Wow!

And yes, he did make it profitable eventually. Neil has a great funnel set up in the background. In short, everyone who visits the tool is also exposed to Neil’s Pro membership.

Although Neil is clearly far ahead, I can mention a small success of my own too. It’s my Social Share Starter plugin. Since its release, it has generated hundreds of new subscribers and opened a couple of doors for me in terms of WordPress software projects.

“Free is the most powerful word in the English language.”

3. Break the pattern by publishing unusual content

At one point, virtually all websites hit a plateau and become predictable.

And don’t get me wrong, in a way, predictability is a good thing, especially if your content is predictably exceptional.

However, introducing something new every once in a while and breaking the pattern, so to speak, can work even better.

Here are some ideas:

If you’re known for publishing ultra-long content, publish an image post with a quote on it and no additional text whatsoever. See how it goes, how many shares it gets, and so on. Like this one:

If you’re mainly publishing text-only posts, try investing in an infographic.
If you’re publishing just your own perspective on things, try inviting someone who has a reputation in your niche and do an interview.
Need more ideas? Try either of these 52.

The idea behind this is to check if what you’re currently doing really is the best use of your publishing calendar, and if maybe your audience would actually resonate with something else even more.

This knowledge is something you can only get through experimentation. No case study on the web will give you reliable data whether you should or shouldn’t try Technique X in your content game.

4. Focus on just the essential info and invoke curiosity

We often feel the urge to go into incredible detail when describing our services, products, or the thing we do for a living in general.

As it turns out, this doesn’t always work. Actually scratch that; it rarely works. The thing is that people don’t really need all that information when making a purchase decision.

For example, consider the following. Do you know what components your iPhone was built with? Do you know what’s the processor, who’s the RAM manufacturer, how many mAh does the battery have, and so on?

Most likely, unless you’re an iPhone freak, you have no clue, yet you still wanted to buy it when it came out.

Your clients only need to know the essentials – how your product is going to enrich their lives.

It’s a similar story with all kinds of products. Your clients only need to know the essentials – how your product is going to enrich their lives.

And it’s not just me talking here. Neil Patel reports this to be the case as well. At one point, he shared that changing the landing page on his private site from long-form, in-depth content, to just the essential short form has given him 318 percent more leads.

It’s kind of sad, but people really don’t care about us or our stories. The only thing they want to know is how your content can benefit them. (Or maybe that’s not sad at all?)

5. Dedicate just as much time to writing your headlines as you do to writing your content

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. But please bear with me.

It’s a known fact in the world of publishing that headlines account for around 80 percent of a given publication’s success.

What this means in plain English is that headlines are more important than content. And it makes sense when you look at it.

At the end of the day, if your headline isn’t a success, no one will even get to your actual content.

So here’s what I encourage you to do:

Write 25 different headlines for every piece of content you create.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

This is not my idea, and to tell you the truth I was also shocked when I first saw it.

The reasoning behind it is that writing the first 5 headlines is ultra-easy. Writing the next 10 gets difficult, but you can still get through it. However, writing that final 10 will get you bleed through your fingertips.

It’s those final 10 headlines that can give you some gems – things that are not obvious at all. Things that you’d have never come up with if you hadn’t used all the common ideas on the first 15 headlines.

The secret is that people tend to resonate with things that break certain patterns.

6. Steal ideas from Reddit

Reddit isn’t called the front page of the internet for no reason. It’s also the best way to waste a Saturday afternoon, but that’s another story.

Reddit is an extraordinary source of content ideas that are interesting to people at this very moment. Now, I don’t encourage you to steal content in any shape or form. But I do encourage you to steal ideas. So if something works on Reddit, maybe it can work in some other form on your site as well.

Here’s how you can implement this:

Look for things that are fast growing in popularity.
Try identifying something about them that you would be able to do or present better.
Release your own version.

I know that such a description is a bit generic, but I leave it up to you to find exact applications.

I will give you an example though. Here’s a popular entry from Reddit’s DIY section: http://imgur.com/a/fD4e4. It’s a guitar-shaped cat playground. The idea is great. The execution is okay-ish. But for someone in the carpentry business, building something that’s of better quality shouldn’t be a problem.

7. Invest in relationships with potential clients by doing free work

First off, I like getting paid for what I do just as much as the next guy. That being said, it’s kind of impossible to make every hour of your work billable, especially if you’re just starting out.

The big problem here is trust, or lack thereof.

In other words, people don’t really trust your expertise enough to pay you for your services if you’re new to the market. To overcome this, you can do either of two things:

(a) Offer your services really cheap – so your clients don’t have to trust you all that much because the investment is small.
Not recommended.

(b) Offer your services for free.
Recommended.

The trick here is that if you start by offering your services cheaply, you will find it very hard to increase your rates later on – the clients will resent it.

On the other hand, if you start offering your services for free, people will understand that it’s not a permanent thing, and that you are likely to ask for money pretty soon.

However, what’s different now is that you’ve already built trust with them and proven that you can deliver results. This entitles you to ask for higher rates.

Speaking from my personal experience, offering free advice is what got me most of my initial freelance writing gigs. I talked about it in one of my guest posts at Be a Freelance Blogger.

8. Be a show off

Note. Showing off isn’t in all people’s nature. And there’s nothing worse than a pretender who wants to show off but doesn’t really know how or why, so they just end up looking cheesy. So in short, if you don’t feel confident showing off, please skip this point.

Showing off is a very interesting marketing and promotion method. On one hand, it’s very easy to appear like a jack ass who’s just bragging about a new watch or some other gizmo. But on the other hand, it can reinforce your message and present a specific persona that resonates with your audience’s wants.

This can work especially well if you’re in the coaching business, or in consulting. The idea is to make people think, even subconsciously, “Hey, this guy has what I want to have. Maybe if I listen to what he has to say, I’ll get there too!”

Whether it’s a valid thought or not is another thing.

9. Reuse your existing results

During the course of your online career, you will naturally have better and worse days, better and worse content, that’s only natural.

But there’s always a small set of posts or articles that did exceptionally well and gave you big recognition. Maybe they even continue bringing consistent traffic through Google today.

So first of all, by all means, go out and find those articles. And then reuse them as a marketing tool.

A man much wiser than me once said that it’s easier to improve something that already works, than it is to build up something that doesn’t.

I couldn’t agree more!

Here’s what you can do exactly to reuse some of your best content:

Step #0

Well, you need to identify this content first. So go to your Google Analytics or Clicky (my preferred tool) and see which posts are the most visited ones on your site. Also, check for your most commented posts (you can sort posts in WordPress by the number of comments) and the ones that have brought in the most social media shares (you can do this via the Social Metrics plugin).

Make sure that there’s a specific call to action under each of these posts/pages. Either invite people to join your newsletter, download your thing, or buy your product (whatever it is you do).

Step #1

Step #2

Erase all distractions from the page. I encourage you to focus on convincing the visitor to do one specific thing. For example, if that thing is newsletter subscription then try making the subscription form the only possible route out of the page. Get rid of sidebars, and if it’s possible, get rid of the top menu as well.

Build additional internal links from other posts on your site to those that bring the most results. This way, you should be able to improve those results even more. After all, your popular stuff is popular for a reason, so if you manage to get more eyeballs on it, people are likely to start sharing and resonating with it more than with your average post.

Step #3

10. Guest post with a purpose

Guest blogging is a very popular promotion method these days, I give you that. However, not many people use it as an actual element of their business.

Here’s what I mean. Every day, I see tens of guest posts where people link to their generic websites (from the bio boxes) or social media profiles. I’m sure this gets them some traffic and recognition. But at the same time, they’re leaving a lot on the table.

(I need to be honest with you and admit that I was just as guilty of doing this as anyone else.)

To give you a good example of things done right, consider this post by Milica Pantic. She explains how she makes money from guest posts directly.

In short, it’s all about these four main elements (in that order):

Picking what you want to promote with your guest post.
Deciding what you can write about to pre-qualify the people that are your target group.
Figuring out how you can point them to what you want to promote.
Finding the best place where to publish your post to reach the exact target group you’re looking for.

The main reason why guest posts are great for this sort of promotion is because you get to position yourself in front of any audience you wish. You just need to find the right website. There aren’t many advertising methods that give you this opportunity.

11. Try local offline marketing

Everybody’s hot about promoting their businesses on the web these days, and rightfully so. However, we shouldn’t forget about all the offline possibilities that are still there and can work exceptionally well.

What’s even better, oftentimes, they are really cheap to execute too. Literally, all you need is some creativity and a bit of time on Saturday.

Here are some of the cleverer things I heard people doing:

Leaving stickers in random places like bars, cafes, public spaces, basically anywhere where other people hang out.

Using chalk to advertise on sidewalks.

Donating branded bookmarks to libraries.

Leaving branded pens at places like banks, post offices, or any other place where people sign their names on pieces of paper. The idea is that the staff won’t notice everyone’s using the wrong pen…

Using sticky notes wherever it makes sense around town.

Printing out beer coasters and leaving them in your local bar.

Leaving your business cards everywhere. Trying places like public bulletin boards, restaurants (along with your tip), inside books at the library, and of course, when you meet a new person.

12. Find, and get on board with existing giveaways

The web is chock full of various giveaways these days. And this is especially valid for all kinds of digital products. Be it plugins, WordPress themes, short e-courses or memberships, e-books, icon packs, you name it. People are ready to give them away left and right.

find giveaways that are related to your niche, then add one of your products to the giveaway

What you can do to capitalize on this trend is find giveaways that are in some way related to your niche and website. The best case scenario is finding something that’s directly in your niche, but if that’s not possible, then go one step up.

For example, if you’re in dog training, there might not be a specific dog training giveaway going on, but there probably are some giveaways or even contests focusing on dog owners in general. Maybe someone’s giving away leashes, treats, or some other dog-related stuff.

There’s nothing holding you back from picking one product from your own offer, and adding it to the giveaway. That way, you’re piggybacking off the giveaway’s popularity by itself. It requires almost no marketing on your part whatsoever.

Of course, the difficult part is contacting the giveaway’s managers and convincing them to include your stuff.

13. Supervise everything

Granted, this is a very counterintuitive piece of advice.

In today’s world, countless experts preach the idea of outsourcing and finding other people to do some of your tasks for you. (By the way, I’m generally preaching it too.)

But the thing we need to keep in mind is that we shouldn’t ever let anyone take over a whole department of our business for us.

For instance, let’s use content as an example. When you first started out, you likely created all of the content yourself. But as you grow, you might get tempted to invite other people on board – to hire help. This is all great and it’s actually the direction you should aim for. However, you should still be the person who’s making the top-level decisions.

be the person who’s making the top-level decisions

The thing is that as you build up your site’s presence, people come and identify with your content. They come to read “you” primarily.

This is a relationship very easy to lose if you disconnect yourself from the publishing process later on. Whoever you hire, will always have their own ideas and ways of handling things. And while you do want to get the most out of their expertise and skill, you need to be very careful not to lose that unique touch that only you can provide.

And this goes for all kinds of tasks you’re doing in your business.

So all of my rambling boils down to this:

Be the decision maker. Don’t assume that others will be better at it than you.

14. Be persistent

Let’s end this list with the simplest advice possible, yet at the same time, something that makes all the difference in our marketing efforts, and basically in anything we do in life.

Being persistent is what makes you successful.

Not talent.

Not hard work.
(If hard work paid off, slaves would be the richest people on the planet.)

Not connections.

It’s persistence.

You maybe know this story, but let me tell you about Michael Jordan.

Jordan was not accepted on his high school basketball team. This may not sound like a big deal, but what it actually means is that he was not a talented kid. I mean, clearly, no trainer in the world would say no to a talented young player who wants to be on their team.

Yet despite not being talented he became the biggest star in basketball history.

He did it because he was persistent.

He even summarized this in one of his famous quotes:

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Let me end this post with this. If you don’t believe me, believe Michael Jordan.

Be persistent. Fail forward. Fail to succeed.
Click To Tweet

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Photo credits: superwebdeveloper / CC BY 2.0, Steve Sutherland / CC BY 2.0, wwarby / CC BY 2.0, ankakay / CC BY 2.0, stevenritzer / CC BY 2.0, mhauri / CC BY 2.0, gfreeman23 / CC BY 2.0, lydiashiningbrightly / CC BY 2.0, alisonchristine / CC BY 2.0, Hedgehog Fibres / CC BY 2.0, mario-mancuso / CC BY 2.0, jdhancock / CC BY 2.0, http://www.freevintageposters.com/2013/01/the-adam-forepaugh-sells-brothers_15.html

Tag: twitter

Measure your social media efforts with UTM tags

Ways to measure social efforts

Using UTM tags

The parameters

Make your own UTM

Let’s measure your social media efforts!

Now, it’s your turn!

Does social media influence your SEO?

Customers are looking for you

Setting up your social media accounts

Social accounts showing in search results

Latest tweets in search results

Claim your space in the search results

More traffic to your website

Brand awareness through social media

Social media and SEO

Social buttons: How to add and track them on your site

What are social buttons?

How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?

Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons

Conclusion

Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium

Which image will Facebook pick?

Social metadata fallbacks in social previews

Weekly SEO Recap: Newsflash!

Twitter blocking robots? Guess not.

Penguin is months away

Google sends notifications, then wonders why

Flash is dead, bye bye!

XML Sitemaps are hard

Search

Contact Us

Location

Phone

Email

Pages

Ways to measure social efforts

Using UTM tags

The parameters

Make your own UTM

Let’s measure your social media efforts!

Now, it’s your turn!

Customers are looking for you

Setting up your social media accounts

Social accounts showing in search results

Latest tweets in search results

Claim your space in the search results

More traffic to your website

Brand awareness through social media

Social media and SEO

How does it work?

OpenGraph

Implementing Twitter Cards

How to use social media

1. Keep your account alive

2. Write captivating excerpts

3. Diversify

4. Handle comments

5. Use awesome illustrations

6. Be part of the community

7. Add metadata

Conclusion

What are social buttons?

How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?

Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons

Conclusion

Posts in this series

Social metadata

OpenGraph

Twitter Cards

But wait, there is more important metadata!

hreflang tags to indicate other languages

Alt tags

Microdata for breadcrumbs

Language declaration for the page at hand

Which image will Facebook pick?

Social metadata fallbacks in social previews

Twitter Analytics dashboard

This month in Twitter Analytics

Tweet activity

Audience Insights

Card Analytics

Be sure to check regularly

Twitter blocking robots? Guess not.

Penguin is months away

Google sends notifications, then wonders why

Flash is dead, bye bye!

XML Sitemaps are hard

1. Be a true-blood guy (or gal)

2. Create products and give them away for free

3. Break the pattern by publishing unusual content

4. Focus on just the essential info and invoke curiosity

5. Dedicate just as much time to writing your headlines as you do to writing your content

6. Steal ideas from Reddit

7. Invest in relationships with potential clients by doing free work

8. Be a show off

9. Reuse your existing results

10. Guest post with a purpose

11. Try local offline marketing

12. Find, and get on board with existing giveaways

13. Supervise everything

14. Be persistent

Similar articles

Search

Contact Us

Location

Phone

Email

Pages

`hreflang` tags to indicate other languages