SEOptimise » Blog http://www.seoptimise.com SEO Blog & Search Engine Marketing News Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:13:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 seoptimisehttp://feedburner.google.com 35 Crucial SEO, Twitter & Social Media Statistics for Business People http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seoptimise/~3/qjfsB81U73g/35-crucial-seo-twitter-social-media-statistics-for-business-people.html http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/03/35-crucial-seo-twitter-social-media-statistics-for-business-people.html#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:13:30 +0000 Tad Chef http://www.seoptimise.com/?p=3806 © SEOptimise - Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code! 35 Crucial SEO, Twitter & Social Media Statistics for Business People

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Numbers and statistics are never true by themselves, it always depends on how you interpret them. On the other hand, without numbers you have no idea what’s going on. Thus we have to study statistics and all other data we can get to stay in business.

Here I’ve collected 35 crucial SEO, Twitter & social media statistics for business people to get an overview of what’s going on actually.

One statistic by itself often lies. Several statistics compared allow you to get a more accurate point of view. Almost all of these statistics have been published in the recent months so they use very current data sets.

SEO statistics

social media statistics

Twitter statistics

Miscellaneous statistics

Why are SEO, Twitter and other social meida lumped together? Well, in 2010 you don’t divide anymore into strictly seperated enities SEO and social media, it’s all

  • search & social
  • findability
  • digital asset optimization
  • SEO 2.0

while Twitter is the foremost mover and shaker right now in spite of its huge brother Facebook. Facebook is rather for contacting real people you already know or could meet in real life.

Twitter influences the virtual and business landscapes more than any other site right now.

Why are these statistics crucial? Nowadays no business can afford to get no or bad publicity online. You need to know what works and how to be able to talk the talk. Otherwise people will talk about you and they won’t say pleasant things only. These statistics allow you to asses where your target audiences are and how they use social media and search.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Can Google Buzz Replace RSS Subscription?

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Over recent months I’ve found I’m reading RSS feeds less and less. The main difficulty is that links are now so often shared on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc – that RSS can easily be forgotten sometimes. It’s actually quite common that I’ll login to see 1000+ items to read so just end up marking all as read and pretending they were never there, rather than being overloaded with information.

Plus there are so many excellent blogs out there now, meaning that it’s impossible to keep up-to-date on every post from the likes of SEL, SEW, SEJ, SER, SEOmoz, Econsultancy etc. What I need is a system that picks out the best posts which I’m interested in and sends them to me instead!

This is where Google Buzz comes in, and I’ve got to admit, I haven’t got Google Buzz yet, I signed up, integrated Twitter and then left it there – like most people. But this morning I tried cleaning up my RSS subscriptions – to help avoid the 1000+ situation and noticed a list of high-quality blog posts recommended from the people I follow on Google Buzz:

Google Reader

At first my reaction was “great, even more feeds I should be reading”! But then I realised perhaps I could use this to my advantage, the people I choose to follow on both Twitter and Google Buzz are very selective – so rather than getting too much information thrown at me from all angles, I’d actually have more trust that we share similar interests and that I’ll like the content they share on Google Reader.

So what I’ve done is unsubscribe from all blogs (expect SEOptimise of course – how do you think we have so many readers?!) and for the next week or two I’m going to try and solely rely on this to filter out the best news from around the blogosphere and keep me up-to-date with all things search.

Is anyone else doing this? If all else fails I’ve got a backup of my old subscriptions so I can always go back to that, but surely it’s worth a try.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

10 Non-Industry SEO Resources and Articles – SEO Mainstreaming

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Amazon River by lollyknit

One obvious Web trend in 2010 is what I’d like to call SEO mainstreaming. SEO goes prime time so to say.

A few people still try to “pull a Calacanis” and tell you that SEO is a dirty word while at the same time spamming Google with fake SEO articles. Nonetheless many other, more sane publishers outside the SEO industry acknowledge that SEO is an indispensable part of any and every Web endeavor.

Thus they publish their own resources and articles dealing with SEO and search marketing. Sadly they don’t get the attention they truly deserve while everybody notices those few who dismiss SEO.

  • technology
  • journalism
  • business
  • social media
  • web design

publications are among those who deal with SEO these days. Even Dilbert covers SEO! I’d like to feature 10 resources and articles from these non-industry resources this time.

  1. How To Use Video SEO To Jump To The Top Of Google Search Results – Techcrunch
  2. App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview – theAppleBlog
  3. Free SEO Icons Set (16 Icons, Private Use Only) – Noupe
  4. Setting Up Wordpress for SEO | 1stWebdesigner Graphic and Web Design Blog
  5. Domain names, misspellings and SEO – Business news by SmartCompany
  6. Asok Lost His Soul – The official Dilbert website
  7. Learn SEO in just two hours – Journalism.co.uk
  8. Big Media or Big SEO Spammers? – GigaOM
  9. Business Insider’s Dirty SEO Tactics – Social Times
  10. What Can YOU Do For Better SEO? (Without Being An Expert) | SocialMouths

The quality of the SEO advice and resources offered is quite high especially compared to the nonsense a few people spread to this day. I’m glad that SEO becomes mainstream. Finally common sense prevails over ill-fated boldness and provocation.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Study: Twitter Users 3 Times More Active than Average Social Media Users

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The Community Participation Pyramid courtesy of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

In this week’s Twitter column I want to debunk a myth that gets spread by the likes of CNN Money and Mashable. Roughly it states that Twitter becomes more of an RSS reader than a real social networking venue due to “only” 27% of Twitter users being active. The number is correct but the conclusion is wrong. The contrary is the case:

Twitter users are by far more active than the average social media users or rather lurkers.

In case you are serious about your web design, SEO and social media success you must know the usability guru Jakob Nielsen. He isn’t always right but where he is he stays right for a decade or more. So once Mr. Nielsen finds something out almost every Web professional acknowledges it and builds hers or his websites according to these findings.

CNN Money and Mashable authors do not seem to read Jakob Nielsen’s articles.

That’s a shame.  Let me introduce the statistics they refer to first though. Internet security firm Barracuda Networks has performed a study about the usage of Twitter. It wasn’t the first one, they have older data to compare it to. Now they have found out in their own words:

The bottom line is this: users are more active on Twitter

In actual numbers it means that, again quote “27 percent of users have tweeted 10 times or more, showing a 29 percent increase since June.” This is the number that gets cited elsewhere as a sign of the slow demise of Twitter activity. It’s not only the 29% increase that makes this number a positive statistic but it’s the comparison to overall social media.

Here Jakob Nielsen appears again on the scene. In his milestone article “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute” from 2006 he examines the usage of several social media sites in the broadest sense. He concludes with formulating a rule of thumb for such sites. It’s the 90-9-1 rule.
In short the 90-9-1 rule says that

  • 90% of users are inactive or lurk
  • 9% contribute once or occasionally
  • while 1% power users provide the bulk of user generated content.

Nielsen goes on to show some extreme examples like Wikipedia where the situation is even more extreme and a tiny elite controls most of the site’s content.

Now let’s compare it to Twitter: On Twitter you have an astounding 27% of moderately active participants. This is almost three times the social media average. 3*9 = 27 but the 1% of power users has to be taken into account as well. CNN Money and Mashable: Please update your erroneous articles. Don’t spread myths in areas you obviously don’t understand.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Survey: People Who Quit Twitter Out of Boredom Haven’t Tried Hard Enough

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This week’s Twitter column is about a very intriguing survey by Neicole Crepeau. She surveyed 336 Internet users asking them several questions about their Twitter usage and perception. The most note-worthy finding is that most of those who have quit Twitter did it out of boredom.

At the same time these people didn’t use Twitter in a way that made Twitter interesting in the first place. So in a way it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: You use Twitter in a boring way and you quickly get bored of it.

I don’t want to argue that Twitter is interesting beyond doubt and for everybody. It depends of course. Neicole Crepeau has gathered data that suggests it was their own fault though.

Most people who have quit Twitter did it after a month or less. Moreover they have followed only 10 people or less and used solely the Twitter website (no external tools or clients). That’s like making your feet wet in a puddle and then saying that “swimming sucks”. They haven’t tried hard enough.

To make Twitter work you have to jump in head first and submerge in the stream for a while.

That’s maybe too abstract as an advice so I’ll suggest some ways how beginners can make the Twitter experience less boring from the start.

  1. Follow at least 50 people but not more than 500 at the beginning to have enough but not too much to read.
  2. Focus on 3 topics you want to read about on Twitter, in my case it’s SEO, blogging and social media.
  3. Search for popular tweets and people covering your topics using tools like Topsy and Tweetmeme and pick the best users to follow.
  4. Organize your Twitter experience by external tools like Tweetdeck or Echofon and internal tools like Twitter lists and favorite users aka “top friends”.
  5. Connect your website and blog to Twitter to make sure to get enough followers yourself. Ask your readers to follow.
  6. Stay on Twitter for a few months and check your tweets a few times a week at least.
  7. Reply and retweet and also start conversation yourself by asking general questions where many people can contribute.

You see it’s not that difficult. Now in case Twitter is still boring OK, you have tried hard enough. Of course you need time and effort but Twitter is not about passive lurking, it’s social networking.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

SEO, Usability and Trust Issues Even the Best SEO Blogs Face

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One of the things I love about SEO the most is that even after years of optimization there is still room for improvement.

Even the best among us still have potential to improve their websites and blogs.

While reading the leading SEO blogs I sometimes encounter basic SEO, usability and trust issues. They’re not big enough to write them an email or there are simply too many of them to reach out to each of my friends and mentors in the SEO industry.

Also I wouldn’t email the likes of Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin out of the blue, they have probably a hundred more important emails in the queue already.

So I decided to follow the line from one Beatles’ song: “With a little help of my friends“. You might argue that the best SEO bloggers out there are not my friends, but reading them a few times a week for years sometimes via multiple channels makes feel as if they are.

Thus I will do my friends a favor and help them to identify some issues their SEO blogs face.

Welcome to the “SEO, usability and trust issues even the best SEO blogs face” post. I bet you will recognize some problems your blog may face as well.

Those of you who are familiar with my earlier writings on my own blog know that I consider SEO, usability and trust to be just parts of one thing: SEO 2.0. Still I wanted to name them for all the others who don’t know me yet.

Hidden RSS Feed Link


Issue: The RSS feed link is either difficult to find or doesn’t exist in the first place.

Example: Sadly one of my favorite search and social blogs Social Media Fish has no feed link at all. It takes quite a while until you find the button on the Humoah SEO blog which is also a must subscribe to resource.

Solution: The link to the RSS feed should be on top of a blog or at least above the fold/scroll.

Un-Linked or Image Post Headlines

Issue: Post headlines often get stripped from the link to the post itself. Moreover some blogs don’t offer text headlines but non-selectable image replacement headlines.

Example: My friend Rishi Lakhani doesn’t let me select the headlines on his non-SEO blog. How am I going to submit his blog posts to social media? Also I can’t copy the link from the post headline, it doesn’t link to itself. The link I arrived on sounds like this though:

http://explicitly.me/google-credit-card-comparison?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ExplicitlyMe+%28Explicitly+Me+-+Rishil%27s+Home+on+the+Web%29&utm_content=Pageflakes

So I can’t reuse it.
Andrew of Local SEO Guide doesn’t let me “copy link location” either. SEOptimise has this issue as well, the headlines are not linked once we’re reading the post.

Solution: Use text for headlines and link the posts to themselves in the headline.

Bizarre Nofollow Attribute Usage

Issue: PageRank sculpting doesn’t work anymore, it hurts your site. Matt Cutts told us so a while ago. Still some people choose to use the nofollow attribute on their sites and internal links. Generally nofollow means “I don’t trust you”. Some people don’t even trust themselves or their best friends.

Example: SEOmoz, perhaps the most renowned SEO blog on the planet, doesn’t seem to trust its own CEO, Rand Fishkin. His profile link uses nofollow. Hey Rand, don’t be so shy, I trust you! So you can trust yourself as well! Another example of bizarre distrust is the blogroll on Search Engine Journal. All links get the “this is potential spam” attribute. When you don’t trust the authorities of your trade why link them at all?

Solution: Dump nofollow altogether or use it really only on crap links you don’t trust.

Search Form vs Subscribe Form Mix Up


Issue: The subscribe via email form is in the right top corner where you’d expect the search form to be. Also it very much resembles the search form.

Example: Check out Search Engine Land by search marketing industry legend Danny Sullivan. The subscribe via email input not only looks like the search form but SEL even writes “…Search News…” above it. In case you just quickly jump over to the search form without reading everything around it you hit subscribe instead of searching. The SEOptimise isn’t perfect here either.

Solution: Clearly separate both forms. In whatever way it suits you.

Commenting Crippled or Impossible

Issue: Commenting doesn’t work as expected or not at all.

Example: Search Engine People by Ruud Hein and his team of SEO superheroes is perhaps the best SEO blog from Canada. While commenting they trick me though. First they want me to give them my URL but then they don’t publish it with the actual comment.

The number one SEO blog in Google.com published by Graywolf doesn’t allow comments at all. That’s sad. I’ve been linked there recently and wanted to add something but there was no way to do so. Without comments a blog is not really a blog anymore.

Solution: To combat spam use a third party tool where people have to log in or let them become members of your blog. Make commenting then “members only”.

Site Marked as Malware or Spam

Issue: Popular security tools like WOT (Web of Trust) have marked your blog as malware or spam.

Example: David Harry of Huomah is one of the most reputable SEO bloggers internationally, but each time I visit his site I get a warning. Lately I have marked his site as trustworthy but still the issue persists. It’s just an orange alert now. I can imagine why he got that bad rep though. When you subscribe to his blog comments you get tnotifications for spam comments as well.

Solution: Ask people who trust you, your readers to vote you up on WOT or McAffee SiteAdvisor. Disable the faulty comment notifier.

Readability Issues


Issue: Your font choice does not work on older Windows versions (XP) or with font smoothing disabled.

Example: The “latest articles” on the Search Engine Journal homepage have barely readable headlines on my system.

Solution: Choose always backward compatible web safe fonts like Arial/Helvetica, Verdana/Tahoma and Times New Roman. At least as a fall back solution.

Misleading Date


Issue: The date on your postings is or can be misleading.

Example: When I arrive at SEO Book by Aaron Wall via Google I often mistake old posts for new ones at first as he doesn’t display the year on top, only the day and the month. You can scroll down to find the date but who will? This way people might think you actually sell old wine in new bottles.

Solution: Display the date in a way that matters. For instance most people don’t care whether you wrote a post at 3 AM or 5PM. Even the days are often irrelevant unless you’re into breaking news. The year matters though.

So you see even the best of the best encounter problems when it comes to SEO, usability and trust online. No website is perfect. There’s always something to tweak. Thus SEO will survive no matter how often it will be declared dead.

Do you know other issues famous SEO blogs have? Do you know some issues here on SEOptimise or over at my badly neglected SEO 2.0 blog? Come on, punch us in the face in the comments!

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Nofollow: Twitter Now Distrusts Everything You Say

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Twitter and nofollow is the topic of this week’s Twitter column: While even Google who has introduced, along with other search engines, the nofollow attribute to combat spam a few years ago does not propagate the use of it anymore, Twitter went nofollow big time just recently. What does this mean?

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

Not only outgoing links get the so called link condom so that search engines ignore them. No, now also internal links from your tweets on Twitter get wasted. This means that even when you address us with @seoptimise we don’t get the Google juice due.

While you might argue that you don’t tweet to get links or for the SEO of it this means that everything you say gets treated like spam.

Andy Beard, a well known figure in the SEO industry, has even quit Twitter due to their new disdain for their users. Now many people don’t know Andy Beard, he’s not Danny Sullivan or John Battalle but his voice gets heard on the marketing community. Also he’s an early adopter. This means he also knows when to leave a site and seek alternatives. He’s quite active on Google Buzz right now instead.

Andy points out that the nofollow attribute and other hurdles lead to very poor indexing and searchability of tweets. In other words: Your tweets get lost very quickly. In order to archive your tweets and relationships you basically need a third party tool or rather more than one. I don’t know one single tool that is able to both save all of my tweets and those of others who address me and make them all easily searchable while keeping an up to date list of my friends.

I archive my own tweets using RSS readers. I simply subscribe to them. A backup of my relationships is not that easy though. I haven’t found a perfect social CRM tool for that. Most tools that add a social CRM layer to Twitter depend on the data from Twitter itself. So in case you want to discontinue your Twitter account like Andy Beard did you lose your relationships. In case they don’t rely on Twitter you have to add your contacts manually which means more effort and work.

Twitter seems to obstruct indexing of tweets on purpose. Pagerank sculpting by using nofollow does not work anymore these days so

Twitter does not use nofollow for SEO reasons.

They either assume that all user generated content is potential spam or they want to sell searchability in future. They might want to charge for archives and search of older tweets. I don’t like this idea of selling your content and relationships back to you. It’s time to re-evaluate the way we use Twitter.

Twitter has stopped access to its data for many free tools out there. Now they limit the access of search engines to the content. What comes next? Follow 100 people for free and pay for more? Just in case, follow me on Google Buzz as well.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

12 Blockbuster #seofilms & #ppcfilms on Twitter

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A new craze has been sweeping Twitter during the last couple of days, with hundreds of suggestions for #seofilms and #ppcfilms. This has been so popular it even managed to make it as a Twitter trending topic!

I’ve picked out some of the best ones here:

SEOfilms 1

SEOfilms 2

SEOfilms 3

SEOfilms 4

SEOfilms 5

SEOfilms 6

SEOfilms 7

SEOfilms 8

SEOfilms 9

SEOfilms 10

SEOfilms 11

SEOfilms 12

There’s a few more funny ones picked out here too – so which one is your favourite?

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

10 Ways to Use Google Buzz for SEO & SMO

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We’ve covered the importance of Google Buzz and we offered a list of Google Buzz tools and resources. The list also contained some ideas about the SEO impact of Google Buzz.

This time I’d like to focus on that: Google Buzz SEO or more accurately on the actual ways to use Google Buzz for SEO & SMO.

  1. indexing – Nobody expected Google to ignore the data coming in from Buzz. The most logical step is to use it for quick indexing of new content. I’ll test that but others have already written that Google will index links you post on Buzz. So to get a new page indexed post it on Buzz or better include a buzz button.
  2. keyword research – Use buzzzy.com, the third party Google Buzz search engine to find out currently popular keywords. They’re displayed right on the homepage as “popular searches”
  3. link building – This is obvious: Google Buzz does not use “nofollow” as Google moves away from this mistake of the past. The nofollow attribute backfired for Google as they can’t index most links these days. Thus they’ve decided not to cripple their own site at least. Twitter adds nofollow to all links in tweets by now, even those to your tweets and profile. Some people only add their Twitter feed to Buzz in order to get it properly indexed and followed.
  4. real time search – Google Buzz items don’t appear correctly in real time results on Google yet but they surely will soon. I guess it’s one of the main reasons Google introduced Buzz, to compete with Twitter etc. for attention. So if you care about timely or real time results start using Buzz.
  5. personal branding - Buzz is very closely connected to your Google Profile. Indeed it even hijacks it as Danny Sullivan calls it. It’s a double edged sword but you can use to your won advantage as well. Choose your buzzes wisely only buzzing the quality stuff and keep the chatter on Twitter and this way you can brand yourself as an expert via your Google Profile. On Twitter the links you post get forgotten almost immediately, on Buzz each time someone comments they end up on top again. So a great item might get attention over and over.
  6. microblogging – While most people compare Buzz to Twitter and Facebook it’s in reality rather a Tumblr and Posterous rival. It’s good for content you just drop quick and dirty without much fuss. Tumblr and Posterous are still much better but Google is bigger. So choose one. Why use microblogging at all? Consider this buzz of mine where I ridicule a SEO spammer. This is not the kind of quality content I’ll post on a regular blog and it’s too long for Twitter. It’s an ideal chunk for Buzz.
  7. content creation – I’d call it content theft but when Google does it it can’t be bad can it? You can repost whole blog posts via Google Reader. As Google facilitates that you can now share (steal) content and get away with it.
  8. crowdsourcing - Crowdsourcing on Twitter is great because of the easy to use nature of it, the critical mass and the responsiveness of real followers. It’s annoying to have to post tweets over and over to make people contribute though. On Buzz one item will suffice. Additions get collected as comments and each time a new comment comes in the item ends up on top of your Google Buzz interface. Isn’t that much more convenient?
  9. multi-platform publishing – In case you don’t care for duplicate content and you are rather keen on getting seen everywhere Buzz is is your friend among other services. I expect Ping.fm and similar services to support Buzz and then it can become another channel for your content. I’m not a friend of this type of cross-posting but I even know non SEO people who do that. Why publish only in one volatile place or use several services each of them separately? Isn’t it a waste. I can’t argue with that.
  10. life streaming – Those of you who already have used Friendfeed now what I’m talking about. You can use Buzz as a life streaming tool as well adding your contributions and content from elsewhere. It doesn’t support as many services as FF but I guess it soon will. So in case you don’t use Friendfeed or like me you’re to seldom actually visit their site you might consider Buzz for life streaming instead.

All in all you can do things with Buzz you can do elsewhere as well. Buzz does not excel at any one of these disciplines, Twitter, Tumblr und Friendfeed are better and more specialized applications. On the other hand

Google Buzz is an all-rounder allowing you to do several things in one place.

Why waste that potential? I use Buzz a few times a week. In contrast I’m on Twitter a few times a day. Buzz is great for the occasional social media appearance without the stress of having to be there all the time.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Avinash Kaushik shows HMV & M&S how “They Came, They Puked, They Left!”

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Last week, Avinash Kaushik opened SES London with a superb keynote presentation about web analytics – see this video interview if you missed it.

There’s some good writeups following this, but one of the parts I found particularly interesting was the examples of how brands perform using search.

Marks & Spencer
One of Avinahs’s examples included an M&S paid search ad, where the landing page for a query on “Marks and Spencer underwear” produced a general Valentines Day landing page – no sign of a relevant product in sight! Here’s the landing page I now see for a query on the same term, the Valentines Day page has been replaced:

Marks and Spencer

“They Came, They Puked, They Left” is how Avinash Kaushik described website’s with a high bounce rate, because users aren’t finding what they are looking for, so they very quickly leave. This is very true in the M&S example, where users are dumped onto the homepage, relying on users navigating to find what they want – instead of directing them straight to it.

HMV
Avinash’s first example showed how despite having a very well-known and established brand, HMV appeared to be relying on this too heavily in the organic search listings. Obviously brand visibility is very important in the search engines, especially when your brand is as strong as HMV, but long-tail is where the real value of traffic comes from. Rather than attracting traffic at the head of the tail, it’s generally the longer-tail and specific queries which generate the bulk of a site’s traffic. Avinash calls these visitors “impression virgins”, these are users who are unlikely to have visited the site before and are attracted by a specific or unique keyword query.

The examples given were queries for branded terms, where HMV were almost always listed as both organic and paid search results. And when performing a product query with the brand name added to this, HMV still dominated these listings – see the example below for “Up DVD HMV“:

Up DVD HMV

Yet when searching for more competitive queries, where the user still has the intent to buy – but they don’t have a preference of where from – HMV aren’t doing enough to attract these first time visitors/buyers into the site. Queries for a range of competitive product queries all failed to display HMV within Google’s top 10 organic listings – here’s an example of a query for the very popular query “Up DVD“:

Up DVD

You may notice that a paid search ad is appearing on the right-hand-side, but in the same way as M&S, this points users straight towards the homepage instead of taking them to the actual product. This has possibly been triggered from a “DVD” phrase matched AdWords keyword, as opposed to the individual product term producing the ad, explaining why a general ad description and landing page has been displayed. Same for the M&S ad being triggered from a “Marks and Spencer” phrase, instead of an underwear term.

Wireless Printers
Another example, although this time for a US site, was a query for “wireless printer” which produced PPC ads for general printers. The ones who actually did sell wireless printers only went as far as sending users to a general printer category page – instead of directing them towards the actual product they searched for. Avinash highlighted that this was a $500+ product – so they really need to be doing everything they can to clinch a sale, rather than hoping they find what they want by navigating and then complete a purchase.

So this goes to prove how important it is to maximise the value from the traffic you are currently generating. An increase in traffic isn’t always the answer, a few small changes in all of these cases is likely to see a big improvement in conversion rates and overall sales figures.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Twitter Crowdsourcing Da Capo: Best of SEO FAQ Thievery

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Welcome back to our weekly Twitter column. Last week I hailed Twitter crowdsourcing and suggested some ideas on how to motivate your peers to participate in your blog postings.

It worked very well in my case, the SEO FAQ I asked you to steal. Many readers and Twitter followers have taken part in the whole process. I credited those who added their questions and answers already in the FAQ itself.

This time I want to show off the contributions done after the SEO FAQ was finished, the stolen SEO FAQs.

Several web publishers (not only bloggers) have taken the questions and provided their own answers. Some of them were so hilarious that I had to share them already on Twitter. Others are both funny and insightful but too long for Twitter. So I want to highlight a few of them. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy:

Sort Everything Out

“What does SEO stand for? Search Engine Optimisation. It really should stand for Sort Everything Out, because these days it includes everything from code to copywriting to information architecture to accessibility. Almost every aspect of the development of a website is scrutinised by search engines today.”

Answer provided by buynary.

30 seconds to 1 year

“How long does it take to get indexed by Google?
30 seconds to 6 weeks. Without SEO it might even take 1 year. These are estimates as I don’t know the algorithm they have in place for indexing.”

Answer provided by SEO Web Help.

you can rank for anything

“Can we rank for iPhones? Sure no problem! Lets just invest $100,000 into a linkbuilding, viral, social, widget and offline campaign that ties it all in, build a site around the niche with tonnes of user engagement and so on. Basically, you can rank for anything – if you’ve got the time, money and aptitude.”

Answer provided by SEOForums.org

The length of a piece of string

“When will we see results?

Unfortunately, this is a ‘how long is a piece of string?’ question.

Ranking can take a while. Sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes longer. It can depend on who is linking to you (if indeed anyone is), if you’ve submitted a sitemap to the search engines and simply when your site went live.

Results depend on how many people are competing for your main keywords, how your site compares to high ranking sites in terms of SEO, how regularly you’re updating your content, which sites are linking to you and the age of your site. Remember as well that SEO is a continuous process that never stops. Keep tweaking your site, monitoring your results, your competitors and your web stats.”

Answer provided by subhub.

Meta keywords are for SEO waardeloos (worthless)

“Moet ik meta tags gebruiken voor SEO? Nee, de meta description is alleen goed om te zorgen dat wanneer je gevonden wordt bezoekers ook daadwerkelijk op jouw resultaat klikken. Meta keywords zijn voor SEO waardeloos.”

Answer provided by E-Difference Blog.

You don’t really need to speak dutch to understand the last answer.
Btw. It’s not too late yet. You can steal the SEO FAQ any day and provide your own fancy answers. I won’t call the Scotland Yard! I promise.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

30+ Google Buzz How tos, Tools and other Resources

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Busy Bee Colony by No Minds Vision

Earlier this week I wrote about how we can’t ignore Google Buzz even if we’d like to. Also I complained about the huge onslaught of Google Buzz news and resources.

To deal with both I decided to compile a list of 30+ Google Buzz how tos, tools and other resources.

Here you’ll find out how to disable Google Buzz but also how to work with it in order to reach your business objectives.

Google Buzz How tos
Unfortunately Google Buzz is not as easy to use technically as Twitter or even Friendfeed. The interface is cluttered and some basic use cases are unnecessarily difficult. These resources should assist you when it comes to disabling Buzz, searching or blogging.

Google Buzz tools
Google Buzz is still pretty new but there are already tools to enhance the Buzz experience. Whether it’s about search, analytics or WordPress tools, we have some valuable options by now.

General resources and roundups
The overwhelming number of posts and articles covering Google buzz has made it difficult to get an overview. These postings manage to give you an idea about most aspects of buzzing.

Google Buzz issues
You thought Google Buzz has only privacy issues? Yes, it has lots of them but that’s not all. You might also want to check out other shortcomings listed below before you dive in.

Google Buzz SEO
Google Buzz SEO is still nascent. Most people in the SEO industry stay silent about what it means. A few not that well known individuals have tried to explain what Google Buzz means for SEO. It’s mostly speculation though. What’s certain is that Goole Buzz buzzes get indexed pretty fast.

Miscellaneous
These should get you a quick overview about Google Buzz.

I bet there are some more resources out there you want to see added to this list. Ad more Google Buzz links in the comment section! After checking out this list 30+ Google Buzz how tos, tools and other resources you might want to join us over at Google Buzz. I’m here and Kevin is here.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Top 10 SES London Day One Tips from Twitter!

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Having attended SES London yesterday, there were lots of great tips and facts from the sessions as always. This time rather than relying on my own notes, the coverage on Twitter has been fantastic so I thought I’d try something different to show the best tweets from day one.

SES London 1

SES London 2

SES London 3

SES London 4

SES London 5

SES London 6

SES London 7

SES London 8

SES London 9

SES London 10

There’s also some amazing coverage from the the blogging machine Jaamit (I’m sure he must have a twin!) and a nice video recap from Guy Levine. If you’re at the event make sure you say hello to Marcus today and Richard tomorrow!

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

10 Reasons You Can’t Ignore Google Buzz as an SEO

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Usually I try most new Google services shortly after their release. I did with Google Buzz as well and I didn’t like it because it didn’t even show up for 24h while the call to action “Try Google Buzz in Gmail” was already in place.

Thus I decided to abandon Google Buzz for good like I did with Google Wave. Also I almost never use Google SearchWiki, Google SideWiki and other old and new Google attempts to get into social media.

Unfortunately you can’t ignore Google Buzz. Especially as an SEO. This time the news is too big to just test and forget it. There are at least 10 reasons for that.

I know “10 reasons” posts are quite boring these days but this form is very apt here.

Google Buzz buzz – Google Buzz is in the news all the time. Indeed the bad publicity even helped it. Most people will notice it sooner or later. Twitter needed years to get as much attention.

Google Buzz is connected to your Google Profile – The Google Profile becomes more and more your homepage on the Web. People will find all your other links there and Google will show it in results for your name. Of course it’s linked to all kinds of Google tools already.

GMail is very popular – I don’t know by heart but I assume that Gmail is one the most popular mail services globally. In July 2009 146 millions of people already used it. All these people will have to deal with Google Buzz, at least by getting rid of it.

Google Buzz will show in real time results – You don’t have to be a prophet to predict that Google Buzz will show up in Google real time results alongside of Twitter.

You either opt out or you’re in – Google loves to make you a user of its new services lately. Whether it’s Google SearchWiki, personalized search or Google Buzz they switch them on by default and you have to opt out to get rid of them.

Google tests trending topics for news – Google has hot trends based on search frequency but now it also tests trending topics on Google News. The new feature is similar to Twitter’s trending topics. I doubt that these will be based solely on Google News stats. Rather Google will determine trends via search and social media analysis.

Your privacy – There were so many privacy concerns over Google Buzz and so many quick fixes by Google last week that I have completely lost track of them. I only know Google Buzz still sucks for privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is known to dismiss privacy altogether (“you don’t want other to know, don’t do it at all”). So you have to check it out, fix your default options at least or even opt out to protect your privacy.

People follow you on Google Buzz – unless you don’t use Gmail (or Google services?) at all you’re on Googel Buzz already and people are friending you. It would be a waste not to follow your friends you now from elsewhere back. In case you use Gmail for business it’s even possible that your clients are following you already. Can you afford not to follow them?

A real link from Google.com – As many people in SEO still like to get links, especially from an authority domain: All your buzzes are extra pages with their own clean URL. The links don’t use the infamous nofollow attribute that renders them useless for search engines.

Email notification – Whenever you like you can address people via email in Google Buzz. You can’t do that in Twitter or Facebook that directly. So even people who would have ignored Buzz will be forced to notice.

Most of these points are also valid in case you’re not into SEO at all but for SEO practitioners they are even more pressing. Make sure to use Google Buzz to you advantage before Google and others use it against you.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

What happens to London SEOs when you remix their drinks?

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Last year we posted Jonathan Allen’s excellent video from SES London 2009 “what should we do with the Black Hats?”.

Now Jon has released a new remixed version, featuring footage from last year’s LondonSEO party into a teaser for the first ever Black Hat / White hat Unconference at this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in London.

value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/U2mxGbrCI9M&hl=en&fs=1″> type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always”
allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″>

It seems, in ancient history, Black Hat SEOs who didn’t follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines were rounded up in a witch hunt and forced to answer some tough questions. Who knew?

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Twitter Crowdsourcing How to

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Crowd by victoriapeckham.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Ever since I’m on Twitter I’ve tried to get as many people to participate spontaneously in writing my posts or rather compiling my lists. I always seek contributions for my “30 something” flagship posts. The appropriate term for these kind of participation is crowdsourcing.

Many people contribute to one cause or piece of content. It’s as simple as that but it’s not simple as all. Even using such a simple tool like Twitter which seems to be perfectly suited for the quick crowdsourcing project without further ado crowdsourcing requires a certain kind of magic.

How do you motivate people you often barely know to participate in writing a blog post?

You could argue that in the SEO industry it shouldn’t be that difficult as everybody seeks publicity, attention and links here. Surprisingly the drive for attention seems not to be enough. People are busy as most SEO professionals have tight schedules. So only from time to time you can get a response that deserves to be called “crowdsourcing”. After all there is no crowdsourcing without a crowd. Two or three tweets are not enough to speak of crowdsourcing if you ask me.

My recent SEO FAQ post was quite successful at enticing a response.

Many people have contributed. Some of them haven’t conversed with me much in the past. So the motivation must have been beyond “I like him, so let’s help him”.

Before I tell you how to use Twitter for crowdsourcing I want to clarify why we should do it.

  • Why bother?
  • Do we need crowdsourced posts at all?
  • Why use Twitter for that purpose?

Crowdsourcing is not only fun and strengthens your social ties it makes sense in order to promote your work. People care much more for a post they’ve contributed to than a random post by someone else. Also the attention span on Twitter is minuscule. normally a few minutes after you tweet your new post it vanishes already from people’s timelines. In contrast you can inform your contributors about the post being published directly addressing them. On Twitter with an @mention.

You could argue that Twitter is not the best medium to crowdsource in the first place due to its “only 15 minutes of fame” nature, crowdsourcing should be done via email and more advanced tools instead. That’s true to some extent but it takes much longer and much more effort to crowdsource without Twitter. So at the end of the day you have to decide whether you want to spend hours or days on a post. Twitter allows you to crowdsource both much faster and in a less time consuming manner.

OK, so how did I inspire my followers this time to contribute? Why didn’t they do it each time in the past just for the sake of the links and mentions?

There many a few reasons for the recent “change of mind”. You have to:

find a common cause
Just creating another SEO FAQ isn’t really interesting for most people in the industry. It’s a rather boring task. Also I wasn’t eager to write another SEO FAQ. Accidentally I’ve noticed a SEO bashing post that ranks for SEO FAQ and that motivated me, the others and even Danny Sullivan before us to debunk it and to outrank it. We’ve seen plenty of SEO bashing in the recent years and most SEO practicioners can’t do very much about it. Almost everybody gets annoyed or even downright angry by those ignorant SEO bashings but you can’t counter them by writing replies as you only add to the publicity the fake pundits seek. So most people ignore it while others add attention to the SEO bashing link baits in order not to ignore it. Here we have the option to fight that crap without actually giving it more attention than it deserves outside the industry.
The goal is to outrank the fake SEO FAQ and to spread the basic SEO wisdom via Google and other channels.

ask a broad question
I often ask questions on Twitter. Ofter there are too specific or to research intensive. This time I asked people to provide tidbits from their daily practice that they remember out of the top of the head. They didn’t have to search for answers or to peruse their bookmarks. They just had to remember their own experiences and to add them. It was more like a brainstorming.

add some humor
A common and justifies reaction to SEO bashings is being at least irritated. While at the same time the people who spread the lies and misconceptions about our industry are not worth it. They will never get it. They don’t want to. We have to win over the people who they reach. These people are often wary of SEO just for the boring theory of it. SEO is hard work and it has no glamor like web design or even a subculture web development and programming aka geekiness. Humor is the perfect ingredient for the otherwise boring SEO topic. With humor you can overcome some of these barriers and make people otherwise oblivious of the topic listen. We had a lot of fun compiling the SEO FAQ questions and answers because most of them were in a way humorous by themselves. The informal way we communicate on Twitter made it easy to be laid back about these Q&A.

strike a cord
Probably one of the main reason for the latest crowdsourcing success was that I was able to strike a chord. Most SEO practicioners are suject to very common, almost annoying questions. Some questions get asked with an astounding frequency and lack of understanding of SEO. this way the humor and common cause of the topic got bundled be the common experience of getting asked the same questions over and over and having the explain the same issues each time anew. Thus some questions are almost running gags by themselves.

give before you take and then give again
I’ve promised links for contributions for at least 12 months by now. This time I did again. While it was not a reason by itself some people contributed also to get a link. There’s nothing wrong with some healthy selfishness. Then I offered even more. I shared the content. This time I offered other bloggers, SEOs and publishers to take half of the list, the questions to be exact and to republish those providing their own answers. While giving away content is quite popular these days due to the Creative Commons alternative copyright movement it’s rare in the SEO industry due to duplicate content issues. We have overcome that just by sharing the questions and no all of it. This way all of the republishers actually remix the post. They have an original afterwards and Google doesn’t filter the newer posts for duplicate content.

announce it
Sometimes I haven’t been outspoken enough about the ability to take part in the latest SEOptimise list. I’ve tweeted it once or twice asking a question, then checked the few replies if any and that’s all. This time I’ve tweeted it several times in different time zones long enough before the publication. Also I added a clear call to action and the tweets have been retweeted by Kevin Gibbons and the official @seoptimise Twitter account. So we reached enough people to find those wanted to participate.

So you see the magic of Twitter crowdsourcing lies in the way you motivate your peers to work together with you.

Following these steps you should be able inspire your peers as well. In case you really succeed at it make sure to tell me. I might even link those crowdsourced posts a examples here.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Robin Hood Tax – Can a Social Media Campaign & Bill Nighy Influence the UK Government?

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A UK trending topic on Twitter today is Robin Hood Tax – with plenty of support for RobinHoodTax.org.uk’s excellent video featuring Bill Nighy:

The idea behind this is that “A tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad”.

So far, this very well-thought out social media campaign has generated:

All leading to 32,031 votes for and 3,811 against.

So what do you think? Is this enough to influence the UK Government and banks into giving up an average of 0.05 percent from speculative banking transactions? Surely it’s worth a go!

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

Steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO Questions You Always Wanted an Answer to

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Recently I’ve read one of those awfully misguided anti-SEO posts. It linked to another blog post called SEO FAQ. It wasn’t an actual SEO FAQ though. It was just another awfully misguided blog post from a guy I have never heard of before and who only reveled in the attention he got from displaying his ignorance. People got angry as usual in such cases of blatant provocation and disregard.

Sadly the Google algorithm still sometimes prefers those who raise hell instead of those who provide useful resources.

So that completely useless SEO FAQ ranks at #2 for SEO FAQ in Google.com and misleads lots of people looking for answers to most basic SEO questions.

Thus I decided to provide a new SEO FAQ. I want to outrank this fake resource. Also I want you to copy these questions and to provide your own answers on your own blog.

I want to see 10 or more real SEO FAQs to outrank this crap. So feel free to copy the questions I’ve compiled with the help of some SEO practicionares from all over the Web and to provide your own answers. I will link your answers in this post as well. So steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO questions you always wanted an answer to.

Some of the Q&As might sound funny, especially the original tweets they’re based on. We had a lot of fun while collecting the questions and answers.

  1. What does SEO stand for? The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization but by now it’s not only about search and engines anymore. See 2.
  2. What is SEO? To define SEO is not an easy task as it’s changing all the time. In 2010 the SEO definition might sound something like this: Everything done to ensure getting found on the Internet and to make sure that the ensuing traffic converts.
  3. Is SEO spam, bullshit, dead etc.? Who knows. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, BBC etc. certainly don’t think so. They practice SEO like most of other website owners. Last time I checked all the people who blame SEO for global warming, the Iraq war, the global economic crisis have optimized their websites according to SEO techniques. By the numbers SEO is booming all the time for several years a in a row.
  4. Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? You haven’t done SEO yet? You have no content? Your site consists mainly of Flash, AJAX or simply graphics? You have asked Jason Calacanis or Derek Powazek for SEO advice? Also you most probably rank for long tail queries already. Question by @rishil and @peteyoung – Answer by @IngoGuava
  5. Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Maybe you need a divorce? No, just kidding. You probably need to disable personalized search. Otherwise Google will serve you the results you most desire.
  6. When will we see results? It will take a while depending on what results you expect what for. Some keywords might even take a year or more while others may work after weeks or months. Perform a thorough keyword and market research first to know. Also SEO is basically a continuous process that never stops. Question by @IngoGuava, @tonyboney and @DolphinPromo – Answer by @IngoGuava
  7. Can we rank for iPhones? Do you sell iPhones? Are you a representative of Apple? Do you sell iPhones globally or just nation-wide? Do you want to spend 50k+$ on SEO monthly? Then maybe yes. Question by @rhyswynne – Answer by @rhyswynne
  8. Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? If you are Jeff Bezos and your site is Amazon you probably can. In all other cases you have to choose and set preferences. You have to determine your main keywords, a few of them, and go after them. Your main keywords are the most popular and profitable ones. A hotel in London would go after hotel london probably and similar combinations.  Question by @maxyRo
  9. How much does SEO cost? How much does a car cost, or a house? First we need to know what kind of car or house you need then we can try to assess the price. Otherwise we can just say somewhere in between 1k and 1 million dollars per month. Everything below 1k is low quality and/or automated.  Question by @seowolf
  10. Why is SEO so expensive? Why are cars and houses so expensive? Because it takes lots of time, resources and work to build them. Besides SEO makes your website actually earn money while setting up website and designing it by itself does not. So at the end of the day SEO earns more money that it takes. Also remember that SEO is not just like a house or car. It’s more like a shop or a hotel when it comes to the house metaphor and it’s more like a race car when it comes to the car metaphor.
  11. How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Google needs minutes to weeks depending on your site to index it or new content appearing on it. Without SEO it might even take forever.
  12. How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.? You don’t submit sites to search engines these days. You link to them from already indexed sites, you ping them via blog posts and or you submit an XML sitemap.
  13. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? Only idiots do. There are only a handful of search engines that you need at all. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask in the US. Mostly Google in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
  14. Do I need an XML sitemap? Depending on your site you may or may not need one.
  15. Do I need meta tags for SEO? No, the meta description tag is good for search users though who might decide whther they click on yours based on the description you offer.
  16. Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? You need internal Pagerank for your site to get indexed. Toolbar PageRank (the green bar in your Google toolbar) is not a prerequisite.
  17. What is linkbait? There are at least two common definitions of linkbait (or link bait). One negative and one positive. The negative one says that it’s luring people to link to you for a reason they normally wouldn’t. The positive one explains that linkbait is a highly linkable masterfully crafted peace of content people not only like but also recommend to others by linking.
  18. Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? She probably can cook as well but you probably would go to a restaurant nonetheless. Designers in most case underestimate the importance of SEO and misunderstand it. They assume that the designer should be decide how a website should be build and when the site is done, they, or rather their clients realize that they’re not even indexed by Google. SEO should be part of website design not just a add on. An open minded designer can provide a good findable site architecture that works for SEO as well. S/he in most cases needs an SEO expert to accomplish that task.
  19. Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Many old school SEO professionals have started out as web developers. Nonetheless they had to focus on other non-technical SEO techniques. A good web developer can provide roughly one third of the skills you need for SEO. Sadly most web developers are clueless about SEO beyond the most common basics.
  20. Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? Programmers often underestimate the difficulty of SEO and attempt to to attain rankings by creating scripts that automatically enhance websites. This is a very risky business as it often crosses the thin line of waht’s allowed by teh search engine guidelines.
  21. Why should I outsource my SEO? SEO is a full time job for a person or requires a whole team with several skills ranging from web development, content creation to marketing. Unless you have at least one experienced full time SEO inhouse it is strongly advised to seek assistance from a SEO compnay or consultant. Question by @seowolf
  22. Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? You can but it’s not enough. Nowadays most modern CMS and blog software has built in technical SEO capabilities. To outrank others who use mostly SEO friendly software as well you have to stick out.
  23. Does Google hate SEO? No, Google even offers SEO advice and a plethora of SEO tools itself. It’s an ages old myth that Google fight SEOs. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners. Most SEO companies are big clients of Google as they also buy PPC ads from Google.
  24. Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? Some people still assume that SEO is used to please search bots only. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for users.
  25. Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? Some techniques considered by many a s SEO are also considered black hat. Still most them can be used ethically as well so only the context can tell you when a particular measure is black or white hat.
  26. Is black hat SEO legal? The question to ask should rather be whether black hat SEO is recommended. No it is not. Most of it is probably still legal, depending on the technique. It pays only for the few who do it on large scale.
  27. Does site size matter? Historically it did matter. For a period of time bigger sites by the sheer number of pages seemed to rank batter. By now the pros and cons outweigh each other – so it does not makes sense to inflate the size of a website artificially by adding low quality content.
  28. Do domain extensions (top level domains like .com, co.uk) matter? Yes they do. Especially when it comes to country based domains like .fr, .de or .es – for local results in respective countries you should use preferably a country domain to get a small advantage. Also many in the SEO industry assume that .edu and .gov domains are trusted more by Google. Google itself has denied that explaining that .edu and .gov domains get more links and thus Google trusts them more. Question by @Ramkarthik
  29. Do nofollow links count? Indeed it has long been known that Yahoo doesn’t discount nofollow links completely. It also seems that Google makes exceptions as well. Plus remember that the main function of a link is to bring visitors. The search engine “juice ” is just a side-effect so a link is a link no matter the attribute. Question by @amabaie – Answer by @amabaie here.
  30. Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? You should try some time travel back to the dark past of early SEO. These things are secondary or negligible.
  31. Is blog commenting for SEO spam? Like in many other cases, it depends dear london real estate! Try changing your name to some real name and add something of value to the conversation and your comment will be very welcome.
  32. I have a question or answer that is not on this FAQ what can I do? There is a comment section! Add your questions and/or answers there. They might get added to the actual FAQ.

OK, now steal this SEO FAQ and provide your own answers. Make sure not to copy both as in this case this would be a case of duplicate content and most likely lead to at least the copy losing ground in the search results.

Also make sure to read this post by Rishi Lakhani where he answers a lot of questions you might encounter in future.

Update: Thanks everybody for taking part in the SEO FAQ meme and providing your often excellent answers:

http://www.sksdesigns.com/2010/02/32-seo-frequently-asked-questions-faq-and-answers/

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

VodafoneUK NOT to Hunt Beavers!

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Image: Happy Beaver by stevehdc.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Yesterday many people on Twitter cried out in outrage about a misled tweet from @vodafoneuk – in it some apparently tweeting under the influence employee made a badly spelled comment about the hygiene of homosexuals.

Then the person also threatened to hunt for beavers!

This is indeed outrageous! As you probably know beavers are an endangered species and have been extinct a few years ago in the UK. Hunting them just to vent your anger is the last thing to do.

This would have been the end of the story as @vodafoneUK clearly stated that it was a breach of conduct. They will NOT hunt beavers. Sadly someone responsible for the renowned UK technology site Tecchuff made the same remarks twice on Twitter since then. Shame on you!

Do we have to witness a wide spread wave of anti-beaver misconduct in the British technology sector?

Also the British press widely reported the incident citing the tweet to make sure everybody who missed the anti-beaver message could read it.

In the meantime @VodafoneUK got additional 500+ followers in the recent days. According the Google Cache they had 8,500 of February, 2nd. During the “breach” they had 8,663. So it seems the good old saying “any publicity is good publicity” also applies here. Now they have approx. 9,050 followers.

There is even the possibility that this was a publicity stunt to get attention.

They may have “pulled a Calacanis” on purpose. They’ve got their brand mentioned all over the web and on several major British publications. Many of them linked to their Twitter account.

Even in the case it was a true blunder we’ve seen that such misconduct pays off.

Nobody seems to be really angry, not even the homosexuals. They probably don’t regard themselves as dirty while they are glad that VodafoneUK has outed itself as being at least bisexual. Still, animal cruelty is unacceptable. Where is PETA when you need them?

Stop the beaver hunt now!

Poor beaver! Our colleagues from SiteVisibility are outraged as well. In case this was done on purpose @VodafoneUK is really bad at being funny though. They should try some good old classy British humor.

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

6 Personas that Google Analytics can’t Track

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This blog post is a bit of fun that might give you some idea of the sorts of  thing that cannot be tracked by your web analytics system…

1. Odysseus Off-Site

Image from Litmuse on Flickr

This intrepid traveller ranges far and wide across the internet but has so far resisted the siren call of your site. People like this are very interesting for online marketers especially if they represent your target demographic but you will not find out anything about them from your onsite analytics. Service like Hitwise or Google Ad Planner can give you information about where on the internet Odysseus is hanging out.
2. Henry In-a-Hurry

Image from boeke on Flickr

Henry decides very quickly if he wants to continue looking at a web page. If your analytics code hasn’t loaded by the time he clicks a link or presses the back button then his pageview will not be recorded. The new Google Analytics Asynchronous code will improve tracking of Henry In-a-Hurry.
3. Nadia No-Script

From notionscapital on Flickr. Also WTF?

For whatever reason Nadia browses the web without javascript. This could be for many reasons; paranoia, browser security settings, browser default settings or browser age. Nadia may be a competing SEO trying to view the web as Googlebot sees it or a geek browsing using only the command line.
4. Christopher Cookie-Eater

Image from zoetnet on flickr

Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Christopher just can’t bear to leave all those cookies just sitting on his hard drive so he eats/deletes them at the end of every browsing session. Chris will be tracked but he will seen as a new visitor even if he visits your site everyday.


5. Deborah Disabled-Cookies

Image from cmaccubbin on flickr

Unlike Christopher, Deborah doesn’t eat cookies at all. In fact, she won’t allow them anywhere near her browser. Some javascript based analytics systems will track Deb’s pageviews but there will be no persistance so every pageview will be seen as the start of a new visit. Google Analytics will not track Deborah at all (probably to prevent your own site appearing in your referrer stats).
6. Thomas Tin-Foil-Hat

Image by jeffhall2069 on flickr

Tom does not like the idea of you having any information about what he does online. He probably has javascripts and cookies disabled but what distinguishes him from Nadia and Deborah is that he has explicitally told his computer to never communicate with Google Analytics. This can be done by editing the hosts file. Thomas may also use a variety of (secure) proxies or Tor so his visits can not even be tracked in your server logs.

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