We want to know how you got into Internet Marketing. Was it through a friend? Was it a news article that captured your attention?  How about a random opportunity? Make it as interesting as possible. It can be either long or short.

You can check out Dave Snyder’s story here.

Here’s my story:

In 2004, I opened up a Myspace and Facebook account. I pushed FB to the side when it stopped being a “private reunion club” for college students and I went full swing with MS. I was a Myspace nut — pimpin’ out my profile and trying to get 50,000+ comments. I wanted to beat Tila Tequila. I failed. Well, a few years later, MS became loaded with spammers and I went back to FB.

I played around with FB for a while. I was constantly writing on people’s walls, posting up pictures and giving out “presents.” It started to suck when I found out people were not adding me to their top friends list nor did I see myself in some of their photos. My jealousy took the best of me. It was so childish, I know.

So during my last semester at the University of South Florida, Tampa, I ended ties with FB. I didn’t want it to consume my time anymore nor did I want to feel the abandonment. I was saying goodbye to all social media.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Gerontology in the Summer of ’07 and ended up landing a finance job in Corporate America with Wells Fargo Financial. How boring!!! I needed something to keep me alive so I tried singing in a MoTown/Classic Rock band. It never took off so I quit. At the same time I took up a fun part-time job with Creative Loafing, Tampa, a local alternative newspaper. I worked in their marketing department on the Street Team. It was a blast! Check out my coverage on Superbowl XLIII.

Since the economy wasn’t doing so well (and it still isn’t!), things didn’t work out with Wells Fargo. With my successful failure at Monster and YahooHotJobs to find a potential employer, I tried my luck with Craigslist. Lo and behold…Search & Social!

I had a meeting with Loren at a nearby Starbucks. I was told that this was just an intern job doing PR. Even though I had debt racking up from not having a full-time job, I wanted to get into PR so I said yes to it. So guess what, I showed my face to FB again. And then I started a marriage with Twitter. I even started a blog for the Tampa girls at Search & Social called SEOtini.

Dave and Loren have taught me a lot about SEO, linkbuilding, social media and online marketing. I was so against it, but social media is a big part of my life now.

That’s my story. Now go make yours! Leave your internet marketing autobiography in the comments section after this post. Comments may not always be posted immediately due to moderation and our spam filters BUT we will approve them once we see them pending. All stories need to be submitted by April 8, 2010.

The winner of this contest will receive an all-access pass for the eight speaker sessions, networking with experts and businesses from across the country, casino night and calypso night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on both days of the conference.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Your Story Contest – Win a Free Pass to the S&S Spring Summit

However they also added a small popup which provides extra information. This popup is only shown when you are logged in.

Quite useful to easily see their bio and activity. That way you can decide much faster if you want to follow someone.

But to show how much twitter thinks things through when implementing something new. Here is a weird anomaly.

When you use the retweet button the retweet gets added to your timeline and is added to your profile page.

Under the retweet is says: “Retweeted by you (and # other(s))”. The word ‘you’ is a link to your own personal twitter profile. http://twitter.com/BajaCa in my case.

But when you perform a mouse-over and the popup shows the bio and activity of the user ‘you’. Alongside is a followed link to his profile.

Seems twitter thinks I am you ;-)

Of course Matt Cutts posted an video last Monday where he explains whether the pagerank of twitter profiles matter.

Since twitter nofollows all internal links, profiles should only get high pageranks through external links.

However http://twitter.com/you has a pagerank of 5.

When we look at the link profile for that page we see this is mostly thanks to the internal links from twitter profiles.

Now you might say Google only sees internal nofollowed links to that profile since the popups aren’t shown to Google  (Googlebot isn’t logged in). But many of the links in Googles cache aren’t nofollowed yet as you can see at some of the cached profiles. Google hasn’t re-indexed every profile yet.

We can see this when we do this search.

Note: the link operator doesn’t provide any accurate results on Google, but usually it shows a small number from the total number of results.

We can expect a drop in pagerank for his profile-page with the next pagerank update. We can expect a drop on everyone’s twitter page!

Where does all the pagerank go? All to the homepage as those links are followed. Useful? Nope, the homepage isn’t going to rank for many keywords anyway.

@Twitter, get smarter! I am not you and internal nofollow doesn’t make any sense!

This is a guest post by Bartjan Cazander an SEO consultant who specializes in SEO targeted for the Netherlands. He blogs about Dutch SEO at BajaCa.nl.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Twitter Thinks I Am You

Needless to say I went right out and picked up a copy. The article alone is worth the price of the magazine (about $5 US). One of Wired magazine’s senior writers interviewed a few members of Google’s team and a member of Bing was also interviewed. This is a really great piece, I recommend reading it. One of the points mentioned in the article that Brad brought up is the varying results for the same term when searching on Google. Since I’m not giving away anything Brad hasn’t already from the article, I feel okay expounding on my opinion about one revelation of the many revealed in Wired.

Google revealed they are placing users in two different algorithms when performing searches. One is the normal or “control” algorithm and the other is the “test”. If a user gets different results than normal the chances are he/she just got to experience the test algorithm. I was sharing this news with a client who asked me days earlier why he got different results in Google from time to time. So I called him back and explained what he might be experiencing. He responded, “What? You mean they are intentionally skewing the results? That’s not fun.” And I have to admit for a split second I agreed with him.

Then I realized as an SEO what Google was potentially offering me, a behind the scenes look at what the engineers are testing. Now I realize this is just a test algorithm which means there is no guarantee that the changes will be made. Not to mention this same articles tells us that Google is planning 550 changes this year. But the fact remain, we are being given a chance to see what is being tested. So how can you use this to your advantage? The next time you notice Google providing some different search results ask yourself these questions:

• How are these results different from the usual?
• Are these results better than what I normally find? If so how?
• Would these new alerts benefit my clients? What challenges would they present?

I realize that this may seem trivial, attempting to look at what Google is testing in order to predict what may come. Ultimately no one knows what Google will do but Google. But come on, you can’t tell me a chance to see what is being tested isn’t intriguing. Part of SEO is staying on top of trends and changes. Google is offering us a chance to look at what is being considered. I think this is incredible. What do you think?

Joshua Titsworth is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Chemidex. Josh maintains the SEO and SMM in addition to assisting with the PPC and Google Analytics reporting. While off the clock he volunteers as a SEO consult to his church in Olathe, KS, as well as to other non-profits in the area. When M.I.A. online he can be found roaming golf courses in search of his shanked golf balls. You can touch base with Josh on his twitter account @joshuatitsworth.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Different Search Results for the Same Term On Google

What it basically does is instructs Google to include more synonyms in the search results and use the bold font for them (Google uses synonyms for generating search results anyway but this operator makes it focus on the synonyms).

I mentioned the operator many times to emphasize how useful it might turn for keyword research – the operator comes particularly handy when used before some most generic terms.

Besides, you can exclude the base term fro the results and thus focus it on synonyms only; for example [~help -help] search will include: tips, FAQ, tutorial, etc:

There’s the way to always see those synonyms while you search Google with Google Semantics FireFox addon. What it basically does is:

• Grabs your search term,
• Adds ~ before it and searches Google;
• Extracts the synonyms Google used in bold;
• Displays the list before your initial search results.

You thus instantly see the list of synonyms right before your search results and can browse further (click any of the synonyms and you’ll be taken to new search results page).

Naturally, the tool works best for generic (one-word) search queries because apparently the tool only inserts operator before the first word in the search query phrase:

The tool can be easily turned on/off from the navigation menus:

More tools to research (Google) synonyms: Keyword Research : Research Synonyms of Any Terms

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

See Google Synonyms While You Search (FireFox)

The cool thing is that if you share your personal information with them, the next time you change your Yahoo contacts details, you no longer have to inform them one by one. Yahoo Contacts will automatically update the information your shared with them previously.

The same thing happens with your friends’ details on your Address Book but only if they opted to share their Yahoo Contact Details’ auto-updating features with their contacts including you.

Setting this up is pretty simple. Just go to  Yahoo Contacts and click on “Share my Info” link which you can find under the Popular Tools option. This will display your current Yahoo Contact Info.  Then click on the Start Sharing button. Yahoo Contacts will then a notification to your friends and business contacts that you have changed your contact info. And they don’t have to do anything as it will be automatically updated in their Address Book.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Rolls Out Auto-Updating Address Book

Tweetmeme button is probably the most popular way to do that, however more and more often I come across blogs that use a similar one provided by Topsy.

So what’s the difference between the two Twitter buttons?

	Tweetmeme button	Topsy button
Tweet count	yes	yes
Where the Tweet is generated	pop-up	new tab
Twitter authentication required	yes (but works either way)	no
Shortcode	yes	yes
Instant /one-click Tweeting	yes	no
Load time	Topsy button seems to take less time to load but this requires ore time to test)
Wordpress plugin	yes	yes
Tweeted status	Retweet / Tweeted	no
Page RT rank	no	yes
Look

Tweetmeme Wordpress plugin:

Tweetmeme plugin does have quite a few customization options that make it possible to position the button and set its look and feel:

• Set which page types to display the button;
• Position it: after or before content (or both) or with the shortcode (wherever you place it);
• Customize styling (floating, margin, etc);
• Choose the type of the button (normal size, or compact widget);
• Set the source (the Twitter name that goes after RT@ in the actual Tweet);
• Select the URL shortener;

Topsy Wordpress plugin

Topsy plugin seems to be easier to customize and besides there are more options:

• Topsy button can be inserted anywhere in the post using the shortcodes [topsy_retweet_small] or [topsy_retweet_big]
• The position and styling of the button can be set with help of a handy table (which allows to customize the button for each type of a page separately);
• Set the source and the button name;
• Choose the color scheme;

So which one do you prefer?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Topsy Button versus Tweetmeme Button

With this in mind, I wrote a couple of posts outlining the idea of an SEO honeymoon and what it might mean to inherit a site of that’s been on a SEO honeymoon.  I wanted to take these posts a little further and highlight a debate that I’ve been having in my head around whether an outgoing SEO agency should fully support the incoming agency or not, and if so, to what extent?

The challenges to being helpful

Without a doubt, without business interests helping an incoming agency to take over an account that you previously managed would be a whole lot easier.  But with business interests in mind, why does this support not happen?

1. Heritage of competiveness between agencies / consultants
2. Reluctance to share SEO ‘secrets’
3. Sabotage the success of the incoming agency
4. Cost to the incumbent of providing this service
5. The incumbent on a sales drive to recover revenue
6. Client’s misunderstanding of the SEO process

…to name but a few reasons.  That said, I don’t want to overly stress that the incumbent agency as the sole driver of this transition, so how else can it be managed?

Who has responsibility for the transition?

It needn’t be just the responsibility of the incumbent to manage this process.  What about a scenario whereby on taking on a contract with a consultant or agency, there was an exit strategy agreed upon, where each party would be obliged to fulfil certain responsibilities?

What if the SEO consultant highlighted, from the outset how responsible, transparent and confident they were in their work that they laid this out as an option to the client from the outset?  Immediately we can see that the client, incumbent and incoming parties all can take responsibility for this process, but does this necessarily take care of business interests highlighted above?  Not really.

Business Case to be a Good SEO citizen

Much of what is to follow is angled as if the incumbent party was the driving force but in reality each of these items can be rephrased to highlight the business benefits of considering funding and contracting and transition process.  So here are few thoughts on why exactly promoting closer working between the incumbent and incoming agency/consultant to be hugely helpful…

It’s a small world. You lose a client for whatever reason but through your bitter attitude you gain a poor reputation across their offices.  This might mean that someone that previously had respect for you and your work, and that could have appointed or recommend you in the future, might lose that within a few bitter days or weeks of behaviour.

Grass is greener syndrome. Clients may well have had a bad bout of the grass is greener syndrome and felt eager to jump SEO ship, when in reality, the former incumbent agency was indeed the most fitting option.  As such, they may well return back to the former agency, but only if they had been professional and supportive in their approach as the outgoing agency.

Future case studies. All-in-all, you don’t want the clients results to dip do you.  I’m sure you’ve worked long and hard to achieve a great deal of visibility so do you really want these drop off and prevent you case studying these sustained results in the future?

Clients being more than a pay cheque. You may well wish to show respect for the people/clients that you’ve been working with by ensuring a smooth transition as it may well be their heads on the line if results slip as a result of poor management of this process.  A key point to remember is that many smarter business folk than me stress that business is as much about relationships as it is about the top-line.

If anything arose from any of these items they could quite easily create a poor image of you and the company’s respect for clients.  As a worst case scenario, if this bad reputation was to travel, it might do untold damage to your reputation amongst your peers and prospective/current clients too.

I’m sure there are a number of other reasons to add to this list too, but these seem to be pretty big chunks of food for thought alone…what do you think?

So is an SEO prenup the answer?

There are certainly pro’s and con’s of each, and I like the idea – but is it really to idealist?

I suppose there are quite big differences of being bitter and professional, but needless to say the way an outgoing / incoming party behave during this process can really show their true colours.

Factoring in an exit strategy is certainly like a marriage’s prenuptial agreement; but if divorces feature as part of 50% of marriages in the UK, then each and every client changing their SEO provider is an almost certainty.  As such, should we not make sure that this transfer of client SEO work is managed efficiently and effectively, and as part of the contract?  Do you do this?  I’d be really interested to hear if you have considered this and in what way, so please share!

P.S. Oh, and please don’t share with my girlfriend that I’ve been using so many wedding analogies lately – I don’t want her to get the wrong idea!!

Ben writes about managing SEO and the joys of SEO consulting on his blog, Just Me and My, an organiser of UK search, analytics and social conference, SAScon, and all whilst working as an SEO Director at Mediaedge:cia, WPP.  Ben is quite the busy bee!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Should Clients Invest in an SEO Prenup?

The iPhone sold its first million units at the 74 day point and according to Flurry in that same time span, the Droid (aka Motorola Sholes), sold just over a million by 50,000 units.

This is a comparison of just one Android phone to the one iPhone model a year, nevermind combining the over 100 Android phones coming to market this year alone.

The point of this is to start thinking of Android as part of your mobile marketing efforts which means if you are creating applications for the iPhone you can convert that code to Android as well using services such as Appcelerator.

To further this point I presented at SMX West earlier this month on Android to highlight why you should shift your marketing focus to the accelerating wave of Android mobile dominance.

Do you feel Android belongs in your marketing efforts?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

The Droid Outsold the iPhone

Hey everyone!! It’s that time of the year again for the Spring Summit and we have some great contests going on! With the success of our Twitter #team contest (which is currently going on until midnight), we decided to roll out ANOTHER contest today. If you’re interested in winning a free ticket, then try your luck on this one! It’ll be fun.

Contest details and the video to post a response to can be found here: Contest Video.

On this, you’ll have the chance to reply to the video that I’m putting up. I ask a very simple question- what funny/weird/strange/awesome experiences have you had thanks to social media? I’ll start the video off with one of my own (the bear video) as an example, but you need to send a video response to our video entitled “Search & Social Spring Summit Contest #3″ and get your friends to rate you or comment on you. Whoever has the most votes wins a free Search & Social Spring Summit ticket!

• Go to our youtube channel located here: Contest Channel
• Watch my video for information on the contest
• Send in your own “video response” with your funny/weird/awkward/awesome social media story.
• The winner will be decided by how many votes/ratings yours gets and runs until April 1st.

If you click to see more comments and responses, you will be able to see this area that allows you to add your own video response-

Now, I don’t want to get any comments about how ditzy I sound on this video- I swear I don’t sound like that in real life. Something about webcams just doesn’t flow well with me. I recorded many a video and, sadly, this was the best one. I happened to ramble alot on it but I hope you hang on through the whole video so you can post your video response! In addition to what I said in the video, it hit me after I recorded it that something else happened to me on social media that would have been far more fun to mention.

My bosses are trying to pimp me out to fight a bear during the summit. Ahhh yes, you can probably find the multiple posts due to the magic of Twitter hash-tags (#SSSS) showcasing their eagerness to see me duke it out with a live (and heavily clawed) animal. It started out as a ping, which turned into a tweet, which turned into multiple re-tweets…. now, this might be a fly by night rumor, or it might be true… but either way, I guess you’ll have to upload your video response and try to win a free ticket to find out :)

As you can tell from my video there are absolutely no standards for how you record it. Use whatever webcam you have- or even your iPhone if you want.

Be honest, don’t hold back. Did you meet your boyfriend through social media? Say it. Did you get stalked through social media? Do tell. But only if it’s not serious. I don’t like hearing about harm happening to people via the internet…only hilarious stuff! Did you win something or get randomly picked for a prize thanks to your social media account? Are you that girl that Conan O’Brien singled out to follow on Twitter and now you’re famous!? Remember- the way to get the most votes/ratings is to just have something completely unexpected. I want to hear EVERYTHING and ANYTHING! Make them fun. The contest ends April 1, 2010.

This ticket will include access into the eight speaker sessions, networking with experts and businesses from across the country, admission to casino night and calypso night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on both days of the conference.

Good luck to you all, and I’ll see you at the Summit :) I’ll be congratulating our winner personally. Perhaps I’ll use the location finder on Twitter to find you so you have another story to tell ;)

PS: Check back to the SEOtini Youtube Channel as well as our SEOtini blog. They’ll be some fun updates coming up!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Youtube Contest – Win a Free Pass to Search & Social Spring Summit

By acquiring Citizen’s Sports, Yahoo hopes to strenghten its social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the web while offering social experience especially since Citizen’s Sports has proven itself in the social sports industry with its innovative applications.

In fact millions of people are said to using Citizen’s Sports various social and mobile products including fantasy sports, live scores and up-to-the minutes sports news. These will blend will with Yahoo Sports content to create a seamless experience for all of us sports fans.

Yahoo Sports boasts of more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.  While Citizen’s Sports popular applications that work with Facebook, MySpace, hi5, iPhone and Android span across professional, college and high school sports. These two sports services are definitely a match-made-in heaven.

The acquisition deal is set to commence in the second quarter 0f 2010. Unfortunately no finacial details were disclosed yet.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Buys Social Sport Site Citizen’s Sports