I was asked by Businessweek to write this article for their web site.

How CEO’s Can Play in the SEO & Social Media Sandbox, by Jim Peake

Leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media (SM) is something that everyone at a business can participate in. There is a hidden and vitally important role that an executive (CEO/CXO) can play in the SEO game. Because executives often have higher level relationships with other organizations they can carry influence. The way to use this influence is to ask your partners and customers for their “web links also known as backlinks” from their web sites pointing back to your web site.

Without going into a long drawn out dissertation on SEO there are two things that executives need to know about SEO.

1) Get organic links from other authority sites (ask for them)

2) Write great original content

CEO’s tend to be in the “deal flow” often. If a customer is driving a hard bargain on a negotiated deal and you know you can give them what they want, tell them they can have it but they have to give you a link from their homepage to your web site in return for this great deal. In some cases this can be of huge value. (They might not give you the link but you can command your higher price). Having relevant incoming links can be of huge value for a few reasons:

1) send qualified traffic from their site to your site (potential leads and/or paying customers)

2) the home page link is where many of their incoming links are going to which carries more weight in the SEO world

3) check the page rank of the customer link on their home page, if it is a PR 3 or higher you are adding valuable linkage to your site (a PR 7 and above is fantastic)

4) if you do business with the government or education markets ask for .gov and .edu domain links because they typically can carry the higher page ranks

Your web team will be really happy to see that you are helping them get more high quality relevant inks. Links are like money in the bank, literally. Take a look at this Businessweek web site and see how many links they have coming in.

The point here is that Businessweek.com has over 2.5 million incoming links from other web sites. The more links you have the more opportunity you have not only of getting traffic but also of ranking higher in the SERP Pages (Search Engine Results Page = more clicks on your web site).

In Businessweek’s case they have incoming links with a PR-8 Rank from RefDesk and CEO Express. This is excellent when you can get these types of home page links coming in. These sites not only have a lot of traffic but they cater to the same CEO’s and executives as Businessweek does, hence these are relevant links and Google loves relevant links coming into your site. Google and Yahoo provide high marks for these links. The high marks turn into high search results pages.

Now I don’t expect CEO’s to start writing copy for web sites any time soon unless they are with a small business and are also the product manager who wants to make sure the information is accurate. This is something just to keep in mind and it is a continual process and you want to keep adding more high quality relevant content to your web site.

How might an executive play in the social media space?

Start by getting a LinkedIn profile. If you already have a LinkedIn profile make sure you encourage everyone in your organization to link to you. You will be amazed at how valuable and profitable their information is in customer feedback and product development if you allow them the access.

LinkedIn Two things to do to get started on LinkedIn:

1) Tell people you are on LinkedIn put it in your bio on the web site, people will want to link to you because you are a leader

2) There is an “Answers section” on LinkedIn. Answer 1 question per month and you will be amazed at some of the people you will meet there. Keep those conversations going, give your knowledge away, and it will pay back handsome dividends

There are plenty of business applications for using Facebook, but my recommendation is that if you are going to go “social media” go Twitter instead. Twitter is a personal news service that allows short messages to be delivered in real time through the web or mobile devices. It will take too long to explain Twitter in detail for this article but you can follow me and ask me how to use Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/JimPeake. On a quick side note Twitter is the perfect place to do market research and customer surveys and get answers back on the same day even within the same hour. Doing this alone can save millions in some cases.

Are you a thought leader? Have you heard about people developing their own personal brands? If you want to make a statement to the business community and you are serious about getting into this social media game, get a “professional blog.” Hire a professional to develop a blog for you. Yes, you can get a blog for free but you will not be putting your best foot forward, and it will show. I hired experts to build and design my blog on http://speechrep.com so that I could present a professional image. I’m not so concerned about “selling” on my blog as I am about allowing people to get to know me and making an environment where they will pick up the phone to call for more information. My blog is constantly evolving with content and functionality.

Think of your blog a front porch to your house, people can swing by and say high but they don’t actually have to come into the house. Directing them to your business web site is like inviting them into your living room or home office, that is where transactions occur. Having a professional blog allows familiarity to exist, people do business with people they know like and trust, and since people like to get to know you before they do business with you a well written blog is a great way to accomplish this.

Be a thought leader and write on your blog your opinions of other articles and papers. 2-4 times per month of this type of writing is enough, 2-3 times per week is excellent, but who has the time? Allow others to comment on your blog posts. Two C-Suite bloggers are Bill Marriott and Fred Wilson.

If there is only one thing you need to remember, write the copy yourself, be yourself and be authentic. If you don’t, you can and will be exposed. It is ok to have others “review” for you but make sure the words are your words and not those of a PR person.

In wrapping up, make sure you comment on others blogs and leave a link back to your site or to your blog, it will help your SEO efforts over time.

Jim Peake is an Internet Marketing Consultant with SpeechRep Consulting in Marblehead, MA who brings products and companies to market using the holistic approach in marketing PR, SEO, PPC, Video, Social Media and offline methods. http://speechrep.com