Open Source Provisioning Strategies Can Help Achieve the Promised ROI

Open source literally is a gold mine for enterprises in 2012+ and as the amount of choices increase exponentially so does the need for a provisioning strategy.

Webster’s basic definition for provisioning is to supply someone or something with provisions. Thanks Webster, I can always count on you to cut to the chase. Since we are not really writing about supplying food, water or clothing rations I had to find a more appropriate and up to date definition.

This one from webopedia describes provisioning as: The process of providing users with access to data and technology resources. The term typically is used in reference to enterprise-level resource management.

That’s pretty good, but let’s dig a bit further into the nature of open source to consider the implications of effectively and safely provisioning it for an enterprise. Three of the largest open source repositories in the world publish the following data about the amount of code available:

• Sourceforge.net - 324,000 unique OSS projects with over 4 million downloads each day
• Github.com – Hosts over 2 million different repositories with over a million end users contributing to the active development of OSS
• Googlecode – Hosts over 250,000 different OSS projects
  

That’s a whole lot of open source, and these are just three major repositories. What about the seemingly infinite amount of other community sites, individual authors hosting their own projects, or corporate sponsored websites that exist to download open source from? It’s a daunting task to even consider how to efficiently and safely provision from that much code let alone do it in compliment to a corporate policy.

By establishing some general provisioning criteria and minimum requirements, that the development communities and their open source products have to meet, enterprises can start to narrow down the choices to some very meaningful selections.

An even more progressive open source provisioning strategy might state the following:

• Open source community projects must be vetted, determined to be safe, and valuable by the enterprise open source review board before the download can be considered
  

• End users and developers must first explore and consider existing internal code repositories before considering external acquisition of new open source products or versions.

• The origin of download for any new open source product must be directly from the project homepage hosted by the original authors/community.

• End users and developers must record the point of origin and date associated with the download if there is not an open source management system in place that automatically tracks the information for them.

Understanding the point of origin when downloading open source is critical to mitigate for potential unknown modifications in the code, unknown changes in license type, the potential for virus, trojans or malware, or intentionally placed malicious code. These potential concerns are rare but the fact is they do exist and the implications of one mistake could be costly. Some enterprises have taken this strategy a step further and regularly empower developers with the knowledge of why using specific open source libraries and repositories may be a very good idea while simultaneously cautioning teams as to why others may not be acceptable.

8 Best Open Source Searchengines built on top of Lucene

Lucene is most powerful and widely used Search engine. Here is the list of 7 search engines which is built on top of Lucene. You could imagine how powerful they are.

Apache Solr
Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Elastic Search
ElasticSearch could be opted if, We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that is built for the cloud.http://www.elasticsearch.com

Index Tank
IndexTank search engine powers search in Reddit, Social bookmarking site. IndexTank is acquired by LinkedIn and released the project as open source. It includes features like Variables boosts, Facets, Faceted search, Snippeting, Custom scoring functions, Suggest, and Autocomplete.https://github.com/linkedin/indextank-engine

Katta
Katta is a scalable, failure tolerant, distributed, data storage for real time access. Katta serves large, replicated, indices as shards to serve high loads and very large data sets. These indices can be of different type. Currently implementations are available for Lucene and Hadoop mapfiles. http://katta.sourceforge.net/

Bobo Search Bobo Browse is an information retrieval technology that provides navigational browsing into a semi-structured dataset. Beyond the result set from queries and selections, Bobo Browse also provides the facets from this point of browsing. It provides support to sort documents on fields that have multiple values. It is stable and used by LinkedIn. https://github.com/javasoze/bobo

Compass
Compass provides real time searchengine built on top of Lucene. It is distributed, transcational, supports Spring MVC, integrates with ORM. Compass provides google-style search, index updates as well as more advanced concepts such as caching and index sharding (sub indexes). http://www.compass-project.org/

Summa
Summa is a fast modular and scalable search engine written in Java. It can simultaneously access a number of different data and data sources and expose it in a unified interface. It supports distributed architecture and fault tolerant. It can be scaled up or down to handle any amount of data.http://wiki.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/

Constellio
Constellio Open Source Enterprise Search is based on Apache Solr and using Google Search Appliances connectors architecture, it allows, with a single click, to find all relevant content in your organization (Web, email, ECM, CRM etc.).http://constellio.com/

Picking a search engine optimization Organization for the Website

The very fact that there aren’t any qualifications necessary to call all by yourself a search engine optimization skilled could make it problematic to ensure your understanding and expertise in study motor optimisation. The vast majority of the Search engine optimization specialists that I individually know discovered Search engine optimization through by themselves, which suggests anyone happens to be an Search engine optimization professional and anyone can setup SEO a search engine optimization organization main industry to possess it’s sensible reveal of cowboys!Being a organization, you want to friend by yourself along with capable Search engine optimization providers to assist you increase your on the web lifestyle and visibility.




The problem is, how can you pick a search engine optimization organization to try and do the perform to suit your needs? The truth is, albeit Search engine optimization may sound complex, deciding on the best SEO company is quite easy. Everything you will need is surely an SEO company that is transparent with all of it’s Search engine optimization approaches and may openly explore the Search engine optimization techniques that they’ll use within optimisation of the web page.Choose a search engine optimization organization that has at present recognized best rankings on their own selected key terms. They ought to have the ability to with confidence position to a minimum of 5 of their consumers whilst in the prior 5 several weeks wherever they’ve shipped best rankings for target keywords and key phrases within the key investigation motors.

Caused by a search engine optimization advertising campaign may differ dependent on a lot of elements. Yet it’s honest to think that does not just about all Search engine optimization companies can declare accomplishment on each of the tasks that they involved by themselves along with whilst in the past 5 several weeks. Even so, whenever they can not effortlessly send you to definitely a minimum of Three effective strategies within the prior Ten several weeks, after that there’re probably not the SEO company you need to get the job done along with.Underneath any kind of circumstances, don’t pick SEO a search engine optimization organization that resorts to using direct gross sales and e-mail marketing to acquire your interest. The whole degree of search engine optimization is usually to get your website to position substantial within the investigation final result page. However when a search engine optimization organization markets their own expert services by means of email spam or direct gross sales simply because their own web page is poorly ranked within the research motors, after that exactly what desire are you able to preserve out they can take action in your case?A fantastic SEO company will have to be reachable more than the cellphone, e mail or chat. They have to have the opportunity to acquire back to you individually with regard to solutions or help inside of 48 several hours after you mail them an e mail. Additionally, a great SEO company must have a chance to discuss to you and clarify research motor optimisation without having utilizing field gobbledygook. You’ll find a number of self-professed Search engine optimization specialists showing their own businesses, however, they hardly know investigation motor optimisation. A number of website designers declare to know Search engine optimization and offer a person it on prime of their internet development solutions but it is dismal to say that almost all of these possess little expertise in exactly how search engines like google get the job done.Most of Search engine optimization organizations won’t have skilled guy energy to conduct the necessary search motor optimisation tasks. Many of these Search engine optimization providers outsource the perform whilst in the Belgium or Indian. Normally, this effects to numerous problems conflicting rapidly.

Everything you truly will need is surely an SEO company that will cope with a person straight, quickly and professionally. Why get the job done along with Search engine optimization corporations that outsource their own Search engine optimization just offshore when you are able produce an instantaneous link with the just offshore SEO company?Experienced Search engine optimization firms realize that search motor optimisation will require two folds; on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation. Tactically, the three stage Search engine optimization that follows basically addresses every critical facet of a search engine optimization advertising campaign.It is actually essential the SEO company you end up picking really should have the opportunity to reword and enhance the rules in your web page working with Cascading stylesheet divisional levels to make certain that they’re W3C certified and that the navigation can effortlessly be spidered through research motors. Your navigation should also give your visitors a fantastic browsing understanding. Moreover, the SEO company you end up picking must be employed in optimizing your information (on-page optimisation) being on focus along with enhanced name labels, meta data, alt labels, heading labels and many more. specific within the key phrases you will be aiming to rank with regard to. Likewise substantial will be the capability of the selected SEO Search engine optimization company to make high quality back links inside your web site (off-page optimisation). Hyperlink developing is the most substantial aspect of your Search engine optimization campaign so makes it carried out thoroughly. A great SEO company must produce superior hyperlinks without having to turn to dishonest (blackhat) Search engine optimization methods. Top quality backlinks are from internet websites which have been very similar for the web-site. Be mindful along with companies stating they might checklist you on remarkable directories. You can find only a few directories that you simply actually want your website on as well as the relaxation, whether or not they’ve got a great pr along with other factors, is usually called hyperlink farms through research motors and so very unwanted with regard to rankings.Pick a search engine optimization organization that could provide you with sensible predictions and honest solutions about how speedy your internet site could be ranked on major from the study motors for the goal keywords and phrases. Be cautious of Search engine optimization firms which may be 100% particular regarding after they can pull your rank within the best on the google listing web page. With exceptions, depending within the dominance with the key phrase along with the financial phrases agreed; an established SEO company will need to obtain leading rankings inside a Two to eight several weeks period of time.

Why Should You Choose A Professional Outsourcing SEO Company?

It is said that the best is always kept for the last. To give your online business a boost, seo outsourcing services is perhaps the last best option that you can opt for. SEO is vast and there is something new to learn about it every day. Those having online businesses know the importance of SEO. Good ranks, leads, conversions all are directly proportionate how and most importantly where your website features in the search engine result pages. It is all about visibility, the higher the rank, the better are the chances of visitors clicking on your website’s URL. Knowledge of the white hat SEO practices can guide anyone in optimizing their sites, but there is a subtle difference. Sustenance- keeping the ranks intact, making it lucrative for visitors to come and stay and turn into prospective clients, these are what a professional SEO company can do for you.
Related Coverage
Why You Should Outsource Seo
Why Should You Outsource your SEO Company
Why Should You Outsource Your Seo Works?
Why to Outsource SEO?
The option to outsource seo is available nowadays and those who are wise are taking the first step to success by getting an offshore outsourcing company handle the job.

Questions still arise about the decision of bringing an outsourcing seo company in the scene being right or not. It is, once one realizes what seo outsourcing services they are getting under a single roof. The countdown begins with this.

A seo company or so as to say any an offshore outsourcing company of repute will not only promise but also deliver. For example, they will start from the very beginning.

It is the job of an outsourcing seo company to understand the need of the client first as every website is different from each other. For this reason an initial set up is what is provided to the client as the first step. Here, the SEO experts study the client’s site and marks the areas where the website is lagging behind its competitors. A lot of things get analyzed here like checking the site for canonical issues, presence of more than one URL pointing to the same page, presence of optimized meta and title, duplicated content in the site, presence of a blog, inclusion of a custom 404 error page, presence of robots.txt, sitemap and XML map, checking for Google Analytics and number of backlinks.

Once the initial phase is over, an in depth competition analysis is generally offered by the company whom you have chosen to provide seo outsourcing services. This phase highlights three things - identifying the competitors, their business analysis and lastly analysis of the competitors’ websites. This offers a clear picture of what strategies they have followed, what tools they have used so that your chosen SEO Company can devise the plans accordingly.

Done this and the next step that is undertaken includes a keyword research. Choosing the correct keywords for which the website is to be optimized is extremely important as they are the path to bring in more traffic and ROI. It is the SEO experts job now to study the most searched keywords, consider what keywords the competitors are using, scrutinize the content and finally bring down the final keywords.

It is now time to set up the platform and that is what any reputable offshore outsourcing company will pursue as the next step. This phase includes setting up a Google Account; install Google Analytics and Webmasters, creating XML and HTML sitemaps and identifying the pages for which the keywords would be targeted.

This is next followed by an integrated on page and off page approach which jointly contributes to the website’s ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. On page activities comprises content optimization and resolving technical issues like identifying broken links, resolving canonical issues and checking URL structure. Off page tasks includes article and press release submissions in directory sites, link building (1 way, and 3 way), paid advertising and so on.

Reporting happens to be the last service in the total package. Maintaining transparency is a main highlight of a professional company handling outsource seo services. The client is provided with a detailed report of the site’s progress and an insight on the future strategies that the SEO expert(s) have decided to follow.

Reasons therefore are plenty to choose a professional outsourcing SEO company to handle the website well. Since SEO does not guarantee a result, what requires on the client’s part is a lot of trust and a little bold step which will lead to the top.

Utilizing SEO Keywords to Optimize your Social Media Accounts

Although many businesses don’t know it, keywords and text are valuable for more than just Google results pages. The same logic that applies to the importance of SEO content also applies to social networks such as YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. After all, these social networks have a search function similar to that of Google. In other words, think of these social networks as simply a different search engine, but just on a slightly smaller scale.

This idea works for both businesses and individuals looking to improve their personal brand. You need to think like the target audience using these social networks, and then think about words they would use to describe you or your company. Once you have the keywords you want to incorporate, you’re set to go. You’ll want to more prominence when these searches take place, so it’s important to make the content look natural, yet apparent on your social media sites. You can do this a few different ways:

• Fill in captions of photos with keywords and use tags with keywords whenever possible.
• Utilize keywords each time you change your status on Facebook or Twitter.
• Include keywords in your LinkedIn headline. They give you a lot of room, so take advantage.
• Place keyword-rich descriptive text in the summary sections of all your accounts.

Although this may seem obvious, many businesses get nervous about constantly using keywords on social media sites because social media is supposed to be “cool.” The key, however, is to making them look natural. What you don’t want it spammy looking content that is stuffed with keywords which doesn’t engage the reader.

Social Media Keywords vs. SEO Keywords

Many aspects of optimizing your social media accounts are similar to optimizing for the search engines. You want content to look natural; you want to think like your target audience; you want to target 2-3 keyword phrases at a time; the more specific the better, and so on. However, there are two vital differences that are important to understand if you’re going to begin targeting keywords for social media.

1. Different Inquiries – What users type into a Google search box and what they type into a social media search box can vary considerably. For example, if you own a guitar shop someone may search for “guitar venues” when looking in Google, but they may search for “guitar songs” on YouTube (searching for a guitar venue on YouTube wouldn’t get too many solid results).

2. Different Answers – Not only do users find different topics interesting on different sites, but they want different types of answers. If someone is typing a keyword into a social media search box, chances are they are looking to have a conversation and connect with a brand. For example, with Google they may want a very basic answer to a credit card processing question, but if they go the extra mile to find you on a social network, they are probably very interested in using your company and their credit card processing vendor. This would make a keyword such as “credit card vendors” very appropriate.

Although Google and social media websites are quite different, you may find that some of your keywords overlap. As long as you consider the two points listed above, you should see success. The great thing to remember is, there is less competition with keywords for social media sites, therefore you will see results much, much faster.

5 Valuable SEO Spreadsheets Resources

As we all know Excel and Google Docs can be great tools for any SEO consultant. Hook Google Docs or Excel up to API’s from Google, SEOMoz, SEMRush or any other tool you like to pull in data and you can begin to automate some key tasks like keyword research, ideas for content generation, and competitive research, backlink analysis, rank monitoring, reports, etc. It’s important to understating how these spreadsheet tools work.

Distilled

Distilled offers an awesome starting place for getting familiar with using excel to manipulate data. They have a handy guide – Excel for SEO that covers a wide range of tasks, tables, time savers, and shortcuts. Be prepared to spend a decent amount of time getting through the workbook and example pdf. This is time well spent as you will gain the knowledge to create your own tools and worksheets that suite your needs best.

http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/

AdWords API Key

This next tool will require you to sign up for an AdWords API Key in order to pull in data. It may take a few weeks for Google to grant access to an API Key. Once up and running this is a great tool for KW research as it grabs exact, broad, and phrase match keywords. You also can see local search volume for mobile and desktop and generate related queries using Google suggest all in an excel sheet.

https://seogadget.co.uk/google-adwords-plugin-excel/

SEOmoz’s API

Once you have boiled down the keyword traffic and selected the keywords that you are looking to rank for this tool will help you quickly figure out which websites are ranking most frequently for the terms you want to rank for. This tool is great for quickly finding out the top competing websites in your vertical. This tool requires access to SEOmoz’s api to work. Once you have figured out your competitors in the SERP you can start researching their backlinks.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649

SEER interactive

This third example comes from SEER interactive. Once you identify the websites that rank for the terms you want to compete for it’s a good idea to reverse engineer their link patters and backlink profile. This excel example shows you how to break down large amounts of link data into actionable steps. Analyze anchor text, domain type, and link category. This is a great tool for figuring out the link profile of the top ranking competitors.

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/competitor-backlink-analysis-in-excel/2011/07/28/

Bring GA and AdWords straight into Excel

After you begin any SEO campaign you are going to need to look at the effects of your efforts and one of the most popular web analytics software in existence is Google Analytics. My final link is a tool that can bring any data form GA and AdWords straight into Excel. This presents a great way to create a dashboard of your favorite metrics right in Excel that you can share with your client if desired. You can also make some nice 3D Bar graphs for some nice eye candy in your reports.

http://www.automateanalytics.com/2010/04/solution-for-combining-data-from-many.html

Tips For Progressive Social Media Optimization

Social media marketing technique can be used by anyone, whether you are doing a miniature level business, a bulky conglomerate, or providing service locally.

Uncertain minds think, how Social media optimization (SMO) can work for our business? If you count the total number of people, who are using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that is over a billion that is almost tenth of the world population! According to Nielson study, 25% of internet usage in USA is devoted to social media. Forrester Research indicates that 75% Americans and 45% internet users visits social networking platforms.

Before you start using SMO, there are some key points to keep in mind.

FOCUS ON YOUR GOAL:
Be specific about what you want to achieve through Social media optimization. Different minds of audience hide in platforms, where you have to try various marketing techniques. Always select the meticulous sites, which best dole out your promoting ambitions.

AMALGAMATE YOUR ADVERTISING STRATEGY:
Be sure about your approach of Social media optimization hysterics with your other promotion accomplishments with no change in brand positioning.

ALWAYS TAKE FEEDBACK FROM CLIENTS:
Social media gives you chance to communicate directly with potential clients, that is not possible in most cases. This not only helps to build trust, but also verifies that which technique is more progressive.

PROVIDE INFORMAL ENVIRONMENT:
Social media optimization is all about presenting social face of your company, so stay away from rigid and formal attitude.

CONTENT SHOULD BE DESCRIPTIVE AND EYE-CATCHING:
Most important feature of social media is content. Create engaging and informative content will drag the users to your site.

CONTROL THE COMMAND OF THE NETWORK:
In order to entice the users to your website define the insistent marketing policy through recurrently updating and posting fresh content, that users consider you as an expert.
Social media optimization cannot replace the traditional marketing, but rather, it augments them by radically increase the prospective contact of your marketing campaign. In digitalized marketing dome, success hinges on level of mutual interaction, you provide to users.

Aurion 4.1 Released to Open Source Community

The Alembic Foundation today announced that the open source volunteers participating in the Aurion Project have released Aurion 4.1 to the public. This release is the second release of Aurion, an open source health information exchange software based upon CONNECT from the Federal Health Architecture. The Aurion 4.1 release includes features that enhance scalability, performance and platform neutrality.

Details about the features and enhancements are included below and in further detail on the Aurion Web site. Aurion 4.1 is now available for download at http://wiki.aurionproject.org/display/R41/Release +4.1+Home.

Aurion 4.1 Features and Enhancements

Aurion 4.1 includes many feature enhancements, bug fixes and software updates. The full list can be found at http://wiki.aurionproject.org/display/R41/Release +Notes, and the following are examples of the updates:

- Parallel Processing: When fanning a Patient Discovery or Document Retrieve request out to multiple communities, Aurion now sends all of the requests out and then collects responses as they complete. This approach removes the bottleneck of waiting for responses before sending a request to the next receiving system.

- 64 Bit Source/Binary Instructions: Release includes installation instructions for 64 bit source/binary on Windows and on Linux.

- Implement Performance Metric Hooks into Aurion: Release includes performance metric hooks into Aurion to be able to run reports on the performance of certain services.

- Core Refactor: In prior versions of Aurion, many services were refactored though there were some services that had not been completed yet. As part of Aurion 4.1, the audit query adapter and connection manager were refactored.

- HIEM-Related Fixes: In Aurion 4.1, a bug that prevented HIEM notify requests from being sent to the Nationwide Health Information Network was corrected.

- Consumer Preferences Profile (CPP) Graphical User Interface (GUI) Fixes: The CPP GUI Web application was not able to update a previously-stored CPP document in Aurion 4.0. This was corrected in this release.

- Oracle Database Creation Script: The Aurion database creation script was updated to be compatible with Oracle databases.

- Linux Binary Instructions: The installation instructions for installing the binary release on Linux were validated and put on the Aurion wiki.

- Investigate Build Tags for Automated Tests: Research was completed on what build tags from the original CONNECT build scripts are required to run the automated test suites.

Improved Testing

The volunteer team that built Aurion 4.1 incorporated testing into the build process. Testing completed with Aurion 4.1 includes:

- Testing of specific issues that were completed
- Testing of Windows binary install
- Testing of Linux source install

In standing up the environments for Aurion, the community implemented continuous integration for builds, unit testing, and publishing of the release artifacts.

Aurion 4.1 Contributors

Aurion's lineup of experienced and dedicated volunteers made the Aurion 4.1 release possible. Many developers contributed their time and abilities to create Aurion 4.1. The volunteer contributions were overseen by Les Westberg of Agilex Technologies and Jon Hoppesch of Harris Corporation.

Contributors included:

- Agilex Technologies: Scott Borst, Neil Webb, and Les Westberg
- Harris Corporation: Jon Hoppesch, Travis Zimmerman and Sai Valluripalli
- Mirth Corporation: Dan Kaplan
- U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC): Jerry Goodnough and Chrisjan Matser About the Alembic Foundation.


The Alembic Foundation is a nonprofit organization (501(c)(3)) dedicated to promoting transformation through disruptive innovation using open processes in open communities to create open technologies that are contributed to the public commons. We aim to make those technologies readily available for use by any and all who want to improve their lives, creating a better future for themselves and others by becoming first class citizens in a services-driven, networked information economy.

For more information about the Alembic Foundation, please visit www.alembicfoundation.org .

About the Aurion Project

Aurion is an open source health information exchange platform that implements the Nationwide Health Information Network standard services and specifications. Aurion is the first project chartered through the Alembic Foundation. It builds upon Aurion's direct ancestor, the multi-award winning CONNECT program built by FHA, to enable the secure exchange of interoperable health information among diverse organizations using a wide variety of technologies. Organizations implementing Aurion as a part of their health information exchange strategy gain the benefits of implementing nationally-recognized standards that enable data exchange with federal agencies as well as with numerous other health IT stakeholders.

How to Make Facebook a Useful SEO Tool

Social media and SEO are more intertwined than ever before; just look at the creation of the latest social network, Google+. Google, the undisputed king of search, is making a viable attempt at entering into the realm of social media, solidly owned by Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook and Bing have formed a partnership to personalize the individual SERP of every Bing searcher. What does this mean for site owners? If you want your SEO to succeed, you have to start incorporating elements of social media into the mix.

Let’s start with the 800 pound gorilla of social networking—Facebook.

1. Promote your content
Social media and content marketing go hand-in-hand so well, it doesn’t make sense to not use Facebook to promote your content. When a blog post/article/video goes live, don’t just let it live on one site and hope that your target audience finds it. Even great content could use a little help getting attention! Post a snippet of your latest blog post to Facebook (not the whole thing!) to not only get a link, but also help drive traffic. If you just post the first paragraph, readers are forced to go to your blog to finish the whole post.

Posting your content to Facebook alerts your social network that there is something new on your page they should check out. It also makes it easy for them to Like or Share your content, further distributing it deeper into their social networks.

2. Cross link your profiles
Facebook may have the biggest user base, but it’s not the only social network your target audience is on. By linking from your Facebook page to Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and any other social networks you are a part of, you are encouraging your Friends and Fans to connect with you on those site in addition to Facebook. This kind of cross-pollination can help you build multiple touch points with the same customer. If you vary up your content from one account to the next, that gives people even more of a reason to connect with you on numerous platforms.

3. Customize and Optimize
Facebook lets brands create a custom URL for their Page, the perfect place to target keywords. Customizing the URL also makes it easier for Facebook users to find you. There may be more than one company on Facebook with the same or similar brand name. A custom URL will help identify you from the others.

Remember, each social profile has the ability to rank in the search engines. That doesn’t mean they only have to rank for branded searches! By optimizing your Facebook page, your profile can rank for targeted keyword searches. Facebook lets you post as little or as much information about your brand as you want. Properly optimizing and customizing it will help your SEO in the long run.

Social Media Changes and Challenges for SEO

The growth and acceptance of social media and Enterprise 2.0 technology has shifted customer expectations for company interaction. Inside the walls of the business, these shifts are bringing together two groups that have often remained separate. SEO strategists traditionally focused on gaining company awareness are now coming together with social media experts to better understand the impact of social media on SEO. Both realms stand to benefit. SEO teams gain awareness amplification when the social teams are most effective. And the social media teams enjoy boosted engagement and conversation participation when highly effective SEO teams bring new audiences into the social media engagement spaces.

Social SEO

But this also has profound shifts for the ways both groups have traditionally operated. Gone are the days when meta-tag keywords and a smattering of comments on competitive blogs would boost search rankings. Social media is old-style communication newly applied to online spaces. It is conversation. The term Social SEO demonstrates the complementary nature of traditional SEO and social media.

When you have a solid Social SEO strategy, you will see uplift in awareness, in conversation and in social engagement. The common thread is to get conversations moving about your company, your product, your service. That is a powerful tool that yields results. A positive conversation can deliver many conversions.

4 Ways to Check Your Social Awareness Pulse

To ensure the right conversations are taking place, businesses can use a set of key questions to determine their social SEO readiness and then apply proven principles for executing the best-fit SEO strategy. Here are four questions you can use to check your social awareness pulse:

1. Are You On Message?

The question for your Marketing and Communications departments is how are they enabling everyone in the organization to be on-message? This is not a command-and-control task. The proactive delivery of business critical content to employees and partners is an important process. Are your systems passive? Do you enable employee and partner engagement on and about those topics? Do your systems facilitate those ad hoc conversations?

2. Are You Synchronized Across Your Teams?

The question for your intranet team is how are they ensuring that everyone across the organization is synchronized? This means that sales, support, consulting and R&D/Manufacturing teams all know that new campaigns are kicking off. Those campaigns, or special deals or new product launches are likely to drive demand and raise questions. Everyone doesn’t need the details, but they should be ready to answer questions, address concerns and point customers in the right direction.

You can bet the SEO team has thought long and hard about the keywords, buzz-spots and behavioral triggers that will likely trigger a response to that campaign. Do others know how to spot those keywords when they come up in conversation? The worst thing for a sales rep is to be caught unaware by a customer talking about that new 20% off deal they just got through a Klout promotion, email campaign or PPC coupon. Kudos to the marketing and SEO teams for landing that prospect, but it leaves the rep flat-footed. That makes the company look bad.

3. Are You Converting Your Existing Social Media Leads?

One of the worst things you can do is pretend that social media matters for your business then ignore sales and marketing leads coming in from social sources. So the question for your sales team is how are they incorporating leads from non-traditional sources into their workflow? Do you even know when you get a lead from a social source? Do you know what to do with it? How to qualify it? How to route it to the most qualified rep to take it from there?

When the SEO team is effective, one result is greater participation in the social engagement spaces the social media team manages. But if you are not converting friends, fans and followers into customers and evangelists, you are on a very friendly path to fail-town.

4. How Do Individual Contributors Answer Social Requests?

Because everyone is potentially on the front lines of customer engagement, how are you equipping individual contributors to deal with the heightened awareness and interaction that successful SEO drives? How are your line workers, back-office admins, and other staff connecting the casually interested with the appropriate experts inside your organization who can take that interest to the next level?

Business has always been social. The difference is that now others can tell if that social environment is inviting or off-putting. Technology is what now enables engagement in ways and at scales never before possible.