Calgary’s Third Tuesday Marketing Meetup Event with Jeff Nelson

On Monday, June 28, 2010, Calgary’s Jeff Nelson of Anduro Marketing spoke to a crowd of about 15 social media enthusiasts at the “Third Tuesday Meetup” (usually not on the third Tuesday!) organized by Doug Lacombe.

Jeff started the session asking the attendees if we felt social media helped search engine optimization (SEO), most attendees felt that having a presence on social media platforms helped their google ratings. Jeff was the naysayer in the group, he went on to prove why.

The main reason social media does not help with SEO is because of the ‘nofollow’ html code that these platforms use. Wikipedia (a site that commonly uses the nofollow code) defines nofollow as: “an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index”.

Some useful links that Jeff shared:

• http://www.seo-browser.com/ – a tool created by Anduro, that lets users see what types of links a website has, no follow? regular? etc.
• http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/07/you-cant-separate-social-media-seo.htm – interesting article

Jeff did explain that YouTube allows one regular link that will affect SEO, the website in your profile, so he highly suggested creating a profile on this site.

The conversation turned to blogs. Blogs are a fabulous SEO optimizer – no question. Jeff also suggested we should all do our best to put key words into the blog posts URL. For example the URL of this post is “calgarys-third-tuesday-marketing-meetup-event-with-jeff-nelson”. I would like my site to come up in search engines when people type in some or all of the following words: Calgary, Marketing, Event – so hopefully that URL will help.

Jeff proved in this session that social media does not necessarily improve one’s SEO, but he did agree without a doubt that it does have value and clearly drives brand engagement. Carry on with social media strategies, and be aware of what really affects SEO.

This event was very valuable, great location (downtown), good engagement from the attendees, admission was free.

I highly suggest future Third Tuesday Meetups, they are now done for the summer, check out the meetup site, Doug does a great job at varying the topics, and he is also a good facilitator and a knowledgeable resource. http://www.meetup.com/third-tuesday-calgary/

Shannon Bowen-Kelsick (sbk)
Twitter: @sbkelsick
contact me: sbk@sbkelsick.com