SYNND Frequently Asked Questions
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SEO
Q: Who would you recommend as the tip people to listen to related to SEO?
A: 3 People...
- Bruce Clay - http://www.bruceclay.com
- Jerry West - http://blog.seorevolution.com/
- Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Q: When tackling a "Key Word" campaign for google search results what is the best way to work on those keywords? blogs with the key word titles? Getting our site bookmarked that has the title of the key words?
A: Keywords are not as important here. What is important is the Social Buzz generated from the campaign this is what produces the result. Of course you want to mention your keywords in your titles, descriptions and tags (if tag is 3 words or less) as this will only help to keep things relevant to humans.
Q: Can there be a duplicate content penalty issue with our articles going all over the Internet?
A: No, there has never been any proof that a duplicate content penalty even exists. There are many legitimate reasons to use duplicate content and many of the most popular site have duplicate content and references from/to duplicated content. Synnd itself does not duplicate any content based on the fact that it forces each user to utilize spinning syntax into their campaigns.
Using Synnd Effectivley
Q: How can people who do SEO as a business get more than 50 credits per day?
A: If you need more credits per day then you need to upgrade your Synnd account to a higher level. Please contact support and we will be glad to set you up on a plan that is right for your business: http://support.socialmediascience.com
Q: Is it best to take one piece of really good content and use social news campaign to get the maximum # of Diggs, for example, or, is it better to spread the # of social news votes over multiple pieces of content?
A: It depends on what your end goal is. Are you going for social exposure, rankings or both? If you’re going for both then you want to spread the votes over multiple pieces of content related to the theme or keyword you are trying to get ranked. At the same time this will give your content social exposure by boosting its popularity in each respective network. The degree of popularity, however, is niche dependent and highly dependent on the public’s perception and actions on your content.
Q: When trying to promote another round of bookmarking, micro-blog, etc. for the same URL it displays and error that this campaign can not be setup because the URL already exists in the system. How can I get around this issue?
A: Any URL can only bookmarked once on any given bookmarking account and only submitted once to any social news site. Therefore it is only possible to create a campaign setup once for any given URL. As the campaign already exists, you can simply go into edit the existing Synnd campaign, increase the max. promotion and reactivate it.
Q: Can you elaborate more upon how to use Social News campaigns? I thought we could not do any sort of promotion with those campaign types (Digg, for ex). How do we utilize these if the end goal is to gain a subscriber, commission or sale?
A: Social News is asking for real humans to read, engage, comment and vote for your content. Use social news to educate, enlighten and entertain (not sell). Lead people to your content and then place an opt-in form to the right. After the prospect is in your sales funnel then you can sell to them. If you use social news to SELL then your content will likely get buried or removed from the social news network. As a result the Synnd QC staff will not approve any social news campaigns that are promotional in nature.
Use social news to gain subscribers but not directly. Give your visitors some good educational, enlightening, entertaining (sprinkle a bit of controversy) content and a percentage will always subscribe to your opt-in. Once they opt in then you have a captive audience to sell to.
Q: What is the best recipe for all of the networks Synnd supports? Can you give us a Synnd blueprint so we use synnd to the best of its abilities.
A: The best recipe is to group each network into buckets (as we have done in Synnd). Bookmarking, Social News, Twitter (micro-blog), Facebook, Blog Commenting
Then you would use each TYPE of network as a set of tools to accomplish specific goals. You would use bookmarking (for example) on all of your content in order to get it indexed and ranked. You might use Social News to build a sollowing by leading people to a valuable piece of content that you think may go viral.
We have created a Synnd Best Practices Guide that will help you make decisions about what Synnd tools to use in order to achieve your desired result:
http://socialmediascience.com/docs/Synnd-Best-Practices.pdf
Q: Can you create an area for members, where you can share valuable vendors (for instance: for Facebook Fan Page creation)? Always best to use a referral rather than search Google blind for a resource
A: We may do this but we will only recommend tools that we ourselves have tested and use on a consistent basis.
Q: How about YouTube? Will Synnd support it in the Future?
A: You can promote anything with a URL using Synnd including YouTube videos. Additionally we have planned to develop video buzzing modules that will increase views, ratings, comments and votes for videos.
Q: I'm a life member, but I am not seeing auto account creation in my account?
A: Auto account creation is not yet available to Pro or Lifetime members as of 2/22/2011. We will be adding this feature soon.
Q: How should we gauge how many votes/comments we need for a particular campaign? If I am in a super hyper-competitive niche, are my chances of obtaining a first page position on Google SERPS within 6 months realistic? 12 months? How does one gauge that?
A: It depends on what your goal is... If you're going for social exposure where your content has a chance to go viral then you would want as many votes/comments as you could get. Using Synnd you only need enough votes/comments to raise the visibility of your content enough for it to "take a foothold" in the social network. Once the foothold is taken then the larger community will continue the voting/commenting process naturally and you can now stop the Synnd campaign. On the other hand, if you're just going for SEO benefit then use a bookmarking campaign to develop inbound references from many people producing social buzz and effecting your search engine positioning/visibility. In this case you should run about 10 buzzes per network. We currently have about 7 bookmarking networks so run the campaign for at least 70 buzzes. If you don't rank as a result of the first syndication attempt then create MORE content and create a bookmarking campaign on that. If the content is of "social" interest (draws clicks/votes/comments) then you should also run a syndication (voting) campaign on it as well. To get to the top of a competitive niche you will have to create/bookmark/syndicate more content related to that niche... This together with the building of social buzz will create authority over time. The length of time it will take you to reach the top of a competitive market is directly proportional to the competition, traffic and the cost per click (PPC) in Google. The higher the cost, traffic, competition ... the longer/more content it will take.
Q:. Is there a direct correlation between votes/comments and backlinks? Are backlinks one of the prime stats we should be using to determine if our Synnd campaigns are effective at all? And if so, what should the relationship be between submissions/votes/comments and backlinks?
A: Backlinks and social buzz (aka. bookmark counts) are two completely different animals. You simply cannot use traditional SEO tools to monitor what is happening in the social buzz world... You need ROBUST systems like those offered at techrigy.com or other very popular social media monitoring tools. These tools are not cheap but they will give you a level of measurement. However, you CAN use traditional SEO tools to monitor and track the progress of your rankings in the SERPs... This is more cost effective means of measuring your results using this network of Synnd users. This is a much more viable option for most. If you want to get into counting bookmarks as a measure of success then IMHO you're involving yourself in an unnecessary endeavor as the true measure is an improvement in search engine positioning.
Q:. What other measurements should we be evaluating to determine if our Synnd campaigns are having a positive effect?
A: Another measurement will be traffic and traffic sources that become visible through analytics. Google Analytics is free and easily installed on any website/blog. This would be helpful to see how your content is spreading beyond the border of the Synnd network and into other networks... This mostly happens when your content is spread through a Syndication (voting) campaign and the content is socially appealing. This is a measure of the viral spread of content (analytics) ... You would also use analytics, of course, to see how your traffic levels are improving for your keywords in the search engines. Need more improvement? ... Add more content and start a Synnd campaign.
Q:. It has been said that Synnd campaigns benefit us in two ways 1) improved rankings with the search engines and 2) direct traffic to our sites/blogs. If that is true, how might we measure these two efforts separately? Having just spent a few hours in the Warrior Forum on the subject of social bookmarking services and tools, it is apparent that many services, none of which I will name here because that isn't the point, are very suspect in the eyes of the buyer. This skepticism stems from the fact that social media marketing tends to take longer than most marketers anticipate when they sign up for such services. They are looking for evidence that their social media marketing effort is worth the time and cost. I found that most of these "warriors" point to 1) the number of backlinks and 2) the page rank of the sites where these backlinks emanate, "link juice", as key determinants of the success or failure of their effort. And MANY of these warriors are concerned.
A:Synnd and the findings behind its development point to what many will term as a NEW ranking factor. In fact, it is not new, it is 3 - 4 years old... We call it "Social Buzz" ... Social Buzz and incoming links (backlinks) are NOT one and the same (as stated)... They are much different from each other. Google knows that people count backlinks as a "measure" so this has led to all kinds of black hat and questionable tools created to manipulate the SERPs through linking networks and linking systems. Social Buzz is another line of defense for the SERPs ... Now bookmarking, voting, commenting, views, etc. by "people" point to content that is of real interest... Social Buzz is quietly intertwined with teh algorithms we have all been trying to crack for so many years. Quite simply, we don't focus on traditional SEO anymore, we focus on building social buzz which can and does "naturally" lead to the traditional incoming link but those links were derived from the (not so new) ranking factor we call Social Buzz. You don't hear people talking about social buzz as a ranking factor that much YET... but you will.
Q:How do I find backlinks produced by Synnd members? I did yahoo, "link:website.com" in which it told me I had three in total for whole site. When I put each site URL pages I end up with a dozen. I know I have a ton of Synnd members around the world that I know bookmarked a bunch of different pages. I should have 100's?
A:Yahoo doesn't count all links and it doesn't count them immediately. The purpose of Synnd is not backlinks (though this is a byproduct) the purpose is social buzz (a new ranking factor). Sometimes it can take days, weeks or even months for backlinks to show in Yahoo! from some of the social networks. This is normal. Backlinks and social buzz are 2 different beasts although there are some overlaps and slight similarities.You can see your promotins recieved for each campaign by following this tutorial: http://synnd.com/training/campaign-activity-reports.html
Synnd Enterprise
Q: Do you have any knowledge of outsourcers who can do some of my synnd work for me?
A:This can be handled by joining Synnd Enterprise.
Q: SYNND Enterprise: How long should I let **new campaigns** run in SYNND? Do they cut off at a certain number of promotions?
A: Unless you specify otherwise (in the campaign description) Enterprise campaigns for bookmarking are randomly set at around 100 max promotions and a random number of daily max promotions. 50 for social news and 100 for Twitter.
Q: SYNND Enterprise: How long should I let promotions run in SYNND? Do they ever cut off at a certain number of promotions?
A: Unless you specify otherwise (in the campaign description) Enterprise campaigns for bookmarking are randomly set at around 100 max promotions and a random number of daily max promotions. 50 for social news and 100 for Twitter.
E-Commerce Sites
Q: I run an e-commerce site with a blog attached to it (.com/blog). I post articles to my blog with a few keywords per post pointing to my category pages (on the main e-commerce site). Is it effective to bookmark those posts just to get link juice to my e-commerce pages?
A: Yes, we highly suggest that you not only promote your main pages but any pages that link to or support your main pages. Many users also promote pages which promote pages that promote their main site (3 levels). This is also known as Superspindling (The Superspindle) here at Synnd.
Q: What do you think is the best strategy for relatively large e-commerce sites (500-6,000 products) to increase visitors, increase search engine rankings, and, ultimately, increase sales using SYNND?
A: Here’s a multi-part answer:
1. Add “Social Proof” widgets to every page of your site. These are widgets that display the number of people who have re-tweeted, liked, bookmarked, etc. Do a search on Google for Facebook Like widgets (for example) to learn more about implementing these. Social Proof (raising the counts) will show new visitors that other people have found the page valuable. This causes visitors to stick on the page a bit longer which is a positive ranking factor. Social Proof will also cause a certain percentage of your visitors to “pay more attention” because OTHER people have found the content valuable. The Social Proof Widgets display these counts and pass this subliminal (or direct) message to your visitors.
2. Run a bookmarking campaign on all pages. Randomize your max promotions and daily max promotions. Give some pages way more popularity than others... MIX IT UP!
The bookmarking campaigns will do 3 things:
1. It will establish Social Buzz. Social Buzz is a ranking factor. The search engines see it as social CHATTER which causes robots to visit, index and rank your content.
2. The Social Buzz (chatter) is backed up with traffic. It is this traffic that causes higher rankings based on Google’s Caffeine update of 2010.
3. The bookmarking campaigns also increase your visibility as multiple references are created. As the Social Buzz increases your visibility within the respective networks increases as well.
The combination of these 2 things on a consistent basis can work wonders on your e-commerce site or any site for that matter.
WordPress
Q: If we already have a facebook like wordpress plugin - do we have to remove it to add the new synnd one?
A: No, Synnd should work on all Facebook like widgets or plugins.
Q: Can you recommend a tool for Wordpress that will help me to optimize my content for the search engines?
A: SEOPressor - http://seopressor.com
Remote Automator
Q: My RA Won't Connect or Keeps Disconnecting?
A: There are a few user controled issues that will keep the RA from functioning properly. Please review these:
- Please ensure that the RA is only running on one computer, if it is on two different computers it will cause an IP conflict.
- Please ensure that there is only one Remote Automator currently running on your computer.
- Please fully close the Remote Automater by right clicking on the RA icon in your system tray and selecting exit. Then restart the Remote Automator by selecting it from your start menu under the Synnd Folder.
- Please ensure that you have installed and are running the most recent version of the Remote Automator. The intallation file and instructions are available at: http://synnd.com/ra/update1.html
- Please ensure that you have the most recent version of JAVA intalled on your computer. The intallation file and instructions are available at: http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp
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