Your Personal Brand and Elastic SEO

In our rush to actively participate in social media and social networking, it is important to stay focused on what we are really trying to accomplish. Every now and then stop and ask yourself these questions:

Does my participation in this social media or social networking site add value to my online marketing efforts?
Am I able to generate content within this space that is relevant to the audience?
How can I use this tool to extend my brand?
Am I committed to using this service to advance my brand (specifically am I willing to expend time and creative muscle)?
Does this service allow me to create outbound links (regardless of their follow/no-follow state)?

With the above questions in mind, I started PeoplePond around a concept I call, Elastic SEO. By using an elastic approach, I have seen my PeoplePond profile jump to the #2 spot in Google while my social media and networking content has seen a related boost.

This is basically a 4 step process:

Develop a single brand profile page. Being partial to PeoplePond mine can be found at http://www.peoplepond.com/davidmcinnis. The important thing here is to build a single online home for your brand profile to reside. Notice my personal brand, my name, is in the URL. That’s important for your profile page to provide.
Create outbound links from all your social media profiles that will point to this central brand profile. Twitter is probably the obvious example. Log into your Twitter account and paste the link to your profile in the More Info URL box. You cannot see the entire URL in the screencap below, but trust me, it is http://www.peoplepond.com/davidmcinnis. Most social media sites have a place for you to include a link to your primary online location. Make it count by linking each to your centralized brand profile.

Take a look at http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmcinnis. Notice again that the link goes to my single brand profile page, in my case PeoplePond.

LinkedIn is uniquely powerful for this since they offer the ability to add hypertext links to your profile. Once you are logged in, add or edit your website links by clicking “Edit My Profile” and then “Additional Information [edit].” Select a link type of “Other” and a space will appear for you to enter a link label (aka anchor text). I choose the label, David McInnis Profile, when I have this option as a way to tell search engines this link points to what I consider to be my profile. The result is now on my publicly visible and search engine crawl-able LinkedIn profile page.Do this over and over again with each social application that offers you the ability to link out from your public profile page within their system.
Finally, link out to all of the above services from your single profile. Make sure that, if possible, you use the XFN tag “me” in the hyperlink so the search engines know the destination URL is part of your online brand. This is as simple as including the rel=”me” tag in your hyperlink. More information on XFN tags is available here: http://gmpg.org/xfn/
Now that you have created an elastic relationship between your social media content and your brand profile, concentrate most of your SEO efforts on your brand profile page.

elastic-seo-graph1

As your brand profile rises in the search engine results your social media profiles and the deep content you create in those spaces will begin to experience a similar and very beneficial organic SEO lift as well. Give it a try. It’s fun to watch.

Share and Enjoy: