Social Media for Universities: Grand Canyon University’s Ryan Gudmundson interviews BlitzLocal CEO, Dennis Yu
What is local?
Local is all about those businesses where there are thousands that do that same thing across the United States, and they differ just by geography. So, it could be the local plumber, the massage therapist, the dentist. Think of all the services that you have. Think of the people that you see day-to-day. Obviously, you’re not going to be able to drop-ship the fact that you need your cavities replaced.
How do blogs contribute to local search?
When you’re blogging locally you can talk about what’s going on at the local shopping mall. You can talk about the new store that opened up in town. You can talk about all those others. But at the same time, why not allow students to blog about their class subjects; to blog about their hobbies?
So, you actually have a matrix organization, and this is where larger-scale SEO techniques will be put into play, because you’re ranking on geo-terms. At the same time you’re trying to rank on category terms. So, you rank in multiple dimensions and when you have a blog-like system, you can tag, right? You can tag this as maybe, you know, you post this video to your student and you tag it as, “Santa Clara,” “SMX,” “local,” “Internet marketing,” and then that goes into a tag cloud and that’s when someone, that might help you rank.
Let’s say you have enough of these videos to talk about local online marketing, and all those will come together and you’ll start to rank when someone types in “local online tutorial” or “university local social networking.” Some of those long-tail, four or five keyphrase terms, right?
OK, so now that I have a blog, how do I get traffic to my blog? SEO = Search Engine Optimization. SMO = Social Media Optimization. Is there a difference?
Here’s how I think about it: People talk about SEO as a hot topic, and rather than the word SEO, which means—you and I will both say “SEO” but another will say SEO, and somebody else will say SEO—but we think we’re talking about the same thing but we’re not.
I would say SEO in its current state will be dead in two years, maybe a little longer. Because it’s not about trickery with how you do your page titles or your meta tags. There’s a lot of people who make a lot of money doing that sort of thing, because you can trick people who have big budgets into doing these sorts of things.
I would say, instead of the word SEO, anytime you say the word “SEO,” say, “traffic.” Because traffic is what counts. And if you break down SEO into legit SEO-it’s traffic, and the rankings come from content and links. You’ve got to have real content. If it’s not real content but it’s scraped content and you’re doing black hat, combining scraped feeds and all that sort of thing, And it’s links: having links from trusted sites. Those are the two that count.
So content … How does content leverage Social Media Platforms, and why are we talking about Social Media?
How does “social” work into the fact that getting ranking or traffic is really about links or content? Well, content is about writing about everything that is going on. You could think of Twitter as like this micro SEO kind of tool because you’re writing about what’s going on: “Oh, I’m in Santa Clara right now having In-n-Out,” or whatever, right? You could write about anything. So that’s … content. What social media does is it explodes the amount of content. Now, unfortunately, that’s a lot of people talking about, “Oh, I didn’t feel good today and now I’m at the shopping mall and I’m taking my dog for a walk.” Well, that’s sort of irrelevant content. When you multiply content, you multiply noise.
So, that’s content. You can think of social as just multiplying content. You can think of links as relationships between, not just Web pages but between people. So, lots of content, lots of people, lots of connections.
