Social Media

Social Media

At Yoast we’re constantly experimenting with the bigger social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. We discuss those experiments here and tell you how to best optimize your site for sharing in the several networks. As this often impacts SEO as well, we’ll often discuss the intersect.

One of the things that a lot of social networks require is a set of specific meta tags and headers, so you’ll find that a lot of the posts below discuss those.

Twitter Cards in action

I first wrote about Twitter Cards in June, when Twitter had just announced them, today I got a tweet from Paul Savage who noticed that they were now enabled for yoast.com. That’s super awesome news as it means that the implementation I did in my WordPress SEO plugin works. Of course I had to do…

Twitter Cards, Open Graph & Social Meta Data

Two days ago, Twitter introduced a new system called Twitter Cards (see their docs). It allows site owners to enhance the expanded tweets Twitter creates for their site, much in the same was as  OpenGraph tags give site owners the chance to determine what their posts & pages will look like when shared on Facebook. In…

Why I dislike Bo.lt

When I released my updated WordPress SEO article a few weeks back, my buddy Avinash was kind enough to tweet it. He tweeted it, at first, with a bo.lt link. Bo.lt is a sharing service that allows you to basically make a copy of a page and add some notes or even some changes to…

Search & Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee

Yesterday, Google launched “Search plus your World“, intermixing search and social and providing even more “personalized” results. There’s a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don’t want “personalized” results. I actually think that normal users do want personalized results and that this is, for the most part, a good thing.…

URLs, social media and campaign tracking

Canonicalizing URLs is a very important  aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. This morning, when checking my feeds, I noticed an example that I thought could help you understand the what and the why of it. What I noticed was this: Smashing Magazine had put out one of their usually…

Join Yoast on Facebook

I’ve been a bit slow on picking up on Facebook, I’ve had an account for ages but Yoast.com never had a Facebook fan page. My buddy Roy kept poking me though and telling me that I was missing out. So now it has: Yoast on Facebook. So I would really like if you join me…

Google FriendConnect API

I’ve been following the #pubcon conversation with interest, and here is the official announcement :). All I can say… look here. Thanks to Matt and Anindo of Google for their help on this!

The analytics issue with Twitter

Twitter is great for traffic, but just how great it is, well, you’ll never really know. Why not? You’ll ask. Well, the only traffic you’ll see coming from Twitter is traffic that comes through Twitters web interface. And most people I know don’t use the web interface, they use desktop and / or phone clients.…

TwitterCounter Dashboard Widget

I’ve recently had some fun with developing the TwitterCounter API (to which we’ve added Twitter Rank yesterday) and my first Mint Pepper for it, and I decided it was time to add another milestone to my development career. I’d never developed Widgets for Apple’s Dashboard yet, but I had seen Dashcode, and that it seemed…

The power of Twitter (clients) exposed

This story shows the power of Twitter and how you should always be prepared for major traffic spikes. Last night, in the beginning of the evening, @michielb twittered that he made a list of most used Twitter clients. I thought it looked pretty cool and asked him if that was measured by unique users or…