“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers such as those pictured in the Radian6 screen shot below.

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube () channel are all on the first page of search results.

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

Whether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination like a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links and outreach activities like blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.”

It’s all about results.  If you don’t measure you won’t know what your results are.  If you try this, let us hear how you do and what you’ve learned you’d like to share.  In social media, we’re all in this together

Image via CrunchBase

Even if you have demonstrable skills and great results, what good will it do you if too few people know what a valuable asset you are to any company or any client?  Zero, or close to it, is the correct answer.  Remember that question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it does it make a sound?” Answer: no, it makes sound waves; someone has to hear the sound waves for them to be perceived as sound.  And someone has to hear about your successes, achievements and accomplishments for you to  be perceived as effective and successful. There is real currency in perception. And it is up to you to shape those perceptions.

I just Googled my name, Gretchen Glasscock and it returned 9,350 results.  It’s kind of scary, when you think about it, how much information is out there about you.  There’s a profile of me on Amazon.com from when I reviewed a book on the Net for them.  One of my Internet providers, of many moons ago, has a profile posted of me with nothing but my name.  Which makes it all the more important for you to write your own profile, which is accurate and which you have control over, so that is the first place potential clients and colleagues go when looking for information about you. ( Not the website with you wearing a party hat or your nieces and nephews climbing on your shoulder as your dog is kissing your ear and you are struggling for balance.)

First, let’s focus on Linked In

Guy Kawasaki, the popular VC and entrepreneur has provided us with Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. I’m going to point out a couple of his tips, but I’d also like to say how much I’ve learned from Guy who is probably one of the most popular personalities on the Net.  It’s easy to see why, when you read his linked in profile.  He comes through as very engaging and personable. He says of his first degree from Stanford, before he went for his MBA:

“These were some of the happiest days of my life. I loved Stanford. Sometimes I wish I could go back to school there. By the way, I majored in Psychology because it was the easiest major I could find.

I think most of us have a tendency to make these facts too stiff and formal. I know I do.  And I’m going to go back and work on mine, to let my hair down a bit, and be more personal, like Guy is.  The end result is you, the reader, immediately think of Guy Kawasaki as approachable, someone who’d like to help you, which is, after all, what you want when your goal is for people to seek you out for your service or product,

Some of Guy Kawasaki‘s advice for your Linked In page”

• Improve your connectability.

Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activitiesYou can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

• Improve your Google PageRank.LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.
• Enhance your search engine results.In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

These small changes, which don’t take long to execute can make a huge difference how visible you are on the Net, and that is your first hurdle: Visibility.  We will work on the rest as we go along.

To read Guy Kawasaki’s  entire post go to Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

AdvancingWomen’com‘s Gretchen Glasscock

Share your story!  That’s how we learn from each other.  I’ll start.  As I was looking over these personal and pivotal entrepreneur tales from Startup Stories #1 from Scott Allen’s Entrepreneur Blog I had sudden flashes from my own entrepreneurial past and I suspect you will, too.

If you are a woman in business, take a look at ” Inside the Green Room - Internet marketer extraordinaire Donna Fox shares her experience as the only woman (not counting staff and spouses) at a conference of 100 top internet marketers.”

I can easily equal that.  In 1995, I was at an Internet conference in Tampa Florida, when the newly Netscape browser enabled Internet was in its infancy.  There were presentations on how to name your web page: beginning with a letter near the first of the alphabet was recommended so you’d come up first in lists of what was then pre-Google search.  There were dramatic videos featuring the metaphor du jour for the Internet, intergalactical spinning of planets, full throttle Star Wars type background music and strobe lights, indicating an out of this world, reaching for the stars future for all of us.

The conference, mostly patting the Internet’s creators on the back and imagining what the Net future might hold, boasted 5,000 attendees with a prospecting for gold mindset, about 5 of whom were women.  Tampa was sporting a brand new 600,000 square foot convention center, views of sparkling Tampa Bay, and huge, airy bath rooms of perhaps 50 stalls. For the very first time I could remember, you could enter the woman’s room and laugh in astonishment if you encountered another woman ( as the guys no doubt scrambled for space down the hall.)

And here were are today, with reports of women on the Net outnumbered 100 to 1.  Ladies, don’t wait to be invited to join the game.  Kick the doors in and come on in.  The Internet and particularly business on the Net is a very friendly place for women to be.  See:

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley
Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

The other story that struck me was Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments? – John Jantsch shares the story of his entrepreneurial upbringing.  This is really an excellent post and I highly recommend it. John notes:

“Many of the traits that make up the entrepreneur are ingrained as habits, I suspect, knowingly or unknowingly, by our well intentioned parents and caregivers.

Fear of failure is learned, fear of success is learned, fear over money and lack are learned, shame in tooting one’s own horn is taught, fear of being called different is acquired. Likewise, innovation can be an observed trait..”

My father, a fearless entrepreneur in a family of entrepreneurs taught us early on to take risks.  He taught us to play poker to learn the connection between the hand you held and the risk you were willing to take on it.  Since scientifically, if 1000 hands are dealt out to 4 people, they will all wind up with the same number of winning hands, the key was in the betting.  And knowing your competition.

If neither your father or your mother or any of your early mentors have been entrepreneurs, AdvancingWomen.com was created as a support system, an electronic mentor to help women succeed and prosper, to kick down those doors and put more cracks in that glass ceiling.

What have your experiences been as an entrepreneur?  Have you started a business?  Tell us about it.  Or tell us what you’d like to hear more about:  solopreneurs?  blogging?  You name it and we’ll discuss it or get one of you to come on as guest bloggers and tell us more.

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