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Twitter Friday: What’s Really Popular on Twitter?

Tad Chef — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:06:04 +0000

In the recent past we have been made believe that the sheer number of tweets mentioning a link is the measure of popularity on Twitter. I don’t speak about popular users here. I mean popular items or tweets.

Twitter is neither Digg nor Google so measuring tweet popularity based on links is just half of the story.

Lately three services contest this assumption with three alternative ways of measuring tweet popularity:

Tweeply counts the number of @replies as a metric to determine the most popular tweets
Favstar counts how often a tweet has been bookmarked or rather added to favorites (clicking the star icon on Twitter.com)
Finally Topsy has found a way to find out which links within tweets are really popular by taking only influential Twitter users into account

The first thing you’ll notice when comparing these three services with each other and other simple link counting interfaces like

is: completely different tweets are popular depending which site you use.

There are a few reasons for these differing results:

There are bots of all kinds on Twitter. Legit bots or RSS collecting Twitter accounts and spam bots creating new users by the thousands. How do you filter them? Topsy seems to have found a solution by focusing on a white list of influential users, those Twitter users who are highly connected and active on Twitter.
Replies are real conversations and only those having a huge following can get many replies. Retweets in contrast can spread from one user to another with no obstacles. Replies are one to one conversations. One speaker speaks, and many reply.
Adding something to favorites on Twitter only happens on a rare occasion. The most favorited tweets of mine after more than a year have been only bookmarked twice! So counting favorites has the potential to identify the true gems as of now.

Some at the end of the day measuring peopularity on Twitter is not as simple as you might have suspected. Of course it’s most probably a combination of all three above. The number of retweets, replies and bookmarks should be combined and analyzed in a more complex algorithm to determine true popularity. Of course the influence of the user contributing the tweets must be measured as well. Let’s see who figures that out first…

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Twitter Friday: What’s Really Popular on Twitter?

Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Find Broken Landing Pages

Richard Fergie — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:28:06 +0000

We recently took over managing a large PPC account. After checking the changes I was making Google kept giving me disapproving looks because of landing page errors. I wasn’t changing landing pages; I was trying to improve the account structure.

How could I easily and quickly find all the pages that were 404ing?

1. Download Xenu Link Sleuth

SEOs love Xenu link for finding broken links by asking it to crawl the whole site. We won’t need to visit every page on a site but we do want an automated way to check if a page exists or not. Download Xenu here.

2. Get a List of Landing Page URLs

Of course, you need a list of all your landing pages. I got this information using AdWords Editor (be careful with the new version). I put it through Excel to remove duplicates but this step is not necessary.

You must save the list as a text file (.txt)

3. Set the Maximum Level to Zero

Open Xenu, click “Options” and open the “Preferences” dialouge. You need to set the “Maximum Level” option to zero. This means Xenu won’t spider the whole site but will only request the pages on the site from your list.

Set the Maximum Level to Zero

4. Import your List of URLs

In Xenu open the “File” menu and select “Check URL list”. Choose your text file as the list.

5. That’s It!

Xenu will automagically try and crawl the pages from the list. Pages that 404 or have some other error will be listed in red.

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Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Find Broken Landing Pages

21 On-Site SEO Tips You Can Give to Your Online Copywriter

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:06:38 +0000

Following on from the common questions I get asked by clients theme, I thought it would be useful to look at listing some on-site optimisation and SEO copywriting tips.

Image credit: Flickr

Many companies will have their own copywriters, but writing online is clearly very different to writing offline material – so it’s always useful if you can provide copywriters with a list of guidelines which can help them to optimise copy for the search engines and an online audience.

These tips are aimed at copywriters and beginners who are looking to get started when optimising their site and should be taken as a guideline only. Everyone has slightly different ideas about what works best and a lot of search engine optimisation is about trial and error. You also need to try and find the right balance between optimising a webpage for targeted keywords and ensuring this is maximised from a user and conversion optimisation perspective. There’s little point in attracting tons of search engine traffic if the page doesn’t convert, and vice versa.

So here are my quick tips and checks to make sure your website is well setup to be found in the search engines:

Title tags
Although this isn’t visible on the page, it is the single most important on-site optimisation factor (see SEOmoz’s search engine ranking factors report) so it definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.

1) Aim for 65 characters, this is the cut-off point in Google when listed with search results and it also helps to keep your title tags concisely targeted towards the most important keywords.
2) Include keywords towards the start of the title tag, again see the SEOmoz SEO factors.
3) Include consistent branding in the title tag. This comes down to preference, but the branding value of having your company name seen several times when listed in search results can be very valuable. I normally opt for a consisitent style of “Keywords | Brand” but this really is down to personal preference, if you have a long brand name it may be worth abbreviating or cutting this down in some way.

Meta description tag
Again, this doesn’t appear directly on a webpage – but a meta description tag is often listed as the result snippet when a site is listed in the search engines.

4) Try to include the keywords you are targeting in the meta description tags, these are highlighted in bold when searched for so they can help to increase a search listings clickthrough rate.
5) Write to entice the user into clicking your listing when it appears in the search results. Think of this as a Google AdWords ad where you can try to influence the clickthrough and conversion rate of an ad by making this sound interesting, clearly describing the landing page and adding a call-to-action so that users know what they should be doing once landing on your site.

Headings
6) Use one H1 heading per page to emphasise the most important keywords on that page to the search engines.
7) Synchronise headings with title tags, to ensure primary terms are targeted as effectively as possible.
8 ) Use H2-H5 Headings to optimise for secondary terms – making sure these are used as sub-headings.
9) All content should have unique title tags and headings, this is to target different variations of keywords – as opposed to competing with itself for the same search terms.

Internal linking:
10) Internal links should be used to cross-link related content – this builds the strength of webpage’s within the search engines.
11) Internal links should be added to when talking about a topic where there is further information available on another webpage from the site.
12) Don’t overuse internal links within copy, just link to a small selection of relevant pages. But when doing this, make sure your links contain keywords where possible. Using “Keyword phrase” instead of “click here”, for example.

Keyword usage on-page/body content
13) Copy should be written specifically for web users. Considering online call-to-action.
14) Aim to use primary keywords in first paragraph of text. In addition to title and heading tags.
15) Use keywords and variations of keywords/secondary terms within main body of text. Aiming for 3-5 instances as a general rule, when in-context.
16) Use keywords within internal links to webpage, cross-linking to related pages using keyword-rich anchor text.
17) Use bold and italics to highlight important keywords. This isn’t a major search engine ranking factor but can help to emphasise certain keywords within a page – but make sure this isn’t overused.
18) Use keyword descriptive ALT tags, ideally optimised towards the same set of targeted on-page keywords.

Keyword density
Seeing that keyword density is often discussed I thought it would be a good idea to explain this. This is one of those overused terms which used to have significance in the search engines, but really isn’t worth losing any sleep over these days. It’s 2009, Google has recently celebrated its eleventh birthday and they are far cleverer than to be tricked by a webpage which has keywords stuffed onto a page a certain amount of times – so this really isn’t the best use of your time!

19) If your keyword density is 0% then yes – you’ve got a keyword density problem, similarly if you’re webpage isn’t readable because it contains too many keywords and doesn’t make sense, this is likely to be picked up by Google as a page which has clearly been over-optimised. I heard someone recommend recently that the ideal keyword density should be the same as the alcohol strength of your favourite beer, I quite like that idea – providing your not Belgian (that stuff must be stronger than Vodka!) – but modern SEO really is more about how keywords are formatted/presented on the page. If you have the perfect keyword density, say 5.5% (Carlsberg), but all of these terms are listed within the footer and navigation – with no mention in the page copy, title tags headings etc – then the page is unlikely to be performing at an optimum level.

Images
20) If you upload images to a webpage try and name these using keywords. For example “/images/keyword-phrase.jpg” – using a hyphen to separate keywords so that these are read by the search engines as spaces.
21) Make use of the alt attribute, optimising relevant images for targeted keywords. As well as helping to optimise your page for the search engines this may help to attract searches via Google Images too.

So these are my tips, I’d also recommend reading some great SEO copywriting tips from Copyblogger and please feel free to leave your own top tips in the comments.

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21 On-Site SEO Tips You Can Give to Your Online Copywriter

Nine reasons why your viral campaigns aren’t working

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:33:43 +0000

Viral marketing is without a doubt one of the most appealing ways for a company to promote a new product on the Internet – it really is a win-win situation; customers do all the dirty work for you, and it costs near to nothing to market your product in front of millions of potential customers. That said, creating a successful viral campaign can be somewhat of an art, but when mastered and implemented correctly, no amount of money spent on billboard, TV, and magazine advertisements will compete.

Image from Flickr.

So why aren’t we all using viral marketing campaigns to skyrocket companies into the fortune 500? Unsurprisingly, most companies do try to launch viral marketing campaigns for their products, but give up due to a either a poor approach to viral marketing, or the lack of scalable ROI results.

Here is a list of my top viral marketing tips:

Don’t restrict sharing – you’d think that this would be obvious when trying to create a viral campaign wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, many companies still require you to enter personal data to access their sharable content such as ebooks, this significantly reduces the success of a viral campaign.

Encourage sharing – As well as not restricting sharing, you should also encourage it. If you run a conference or workshop, ask the audience to get their phones out and video you saying or doing something interesting, funny, or controversial, this content will often end up on Youtube or Facebook, infront of your audiences networks.

Don’t talk about your products – Many companies fall into the trap of filling their advertising and marketing content to the brim with corporate gobblydegook, and jargon that doesn’t interact with the customers needs. If you want customers to share your content they must be able to understand it.

Trigger emotions – Some of the most successful viral campaigns are those which provoke an extreme emotion. Think of some of the films, music, and Youtube videos you have shared with friends; it’s likely that they made you feel either very happy, very sad, very relaxed, very confused etc – People rarely share stories that didn’t have an effect on them.

Target the right people – It makes sense to target your viral campaigns at those who have the biggest online influence in your industry first, this often includes bloggers, social media users, and forum members for industry specific forums.

Understand the purpose of your campaign – The most successful viral marketing campaigns are not those that directly try to sell a product, or create leads. Instead, it should be used to create a buzz about your product, or brand. This will indirectly increase interest in your products or brand. Remember the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert? Not once does the advert say ‘Buy Cadbury products because X, Y, and Z’, they just did something unique and funny which saturated the internet for months with mentions of the Cadbury brand and product. Think about it, that advert ticked all of the boxes mentioned in this post.

Don’t be afraid of producing ‘off-brand’ content – Many corporate companies are afraid of producing the kind of viral content that works best because it doesn’t fit their traditional brand image. Well, that’s even better – many companies have benefited massively from unexpected content going viral because people are so suprised to see a company in such a way, they feel they have to share it.

Be controversial / Provocative – People love talking about controversial issues, so don’t be afraid to strike a few nerves, after all, people disagreeing with you will only provoke discussion, which is what viral marketing is all about.

Make it easy to consume – Let’s face it, people are pretty lazy on the internet and like information to be as simple as possible to consume. If you’re launching a video, keep it short (under 3 minutes works best), ensure it can be easily found on your website if promoting on your own networks, and if possible make it understandable to viewers who do not have sound.

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Nine reasons why your viral campaigns aren’t working

Twitter Friday: 20 Twitter Lists for the SEO Industry

Tad Chef — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:13:58 +0000

Last week I wrote about Twitter lists for the first time, this week it already seems you can’t live without them anymore. There are so many Twitter lists out there by now that even a directory like Listorious can’t help you much finding the right ones.

There are hundreds for SEO alone already. So I decided to hand pick 20 Twitter lists for the SEO industry to follow for aspiring SEO & social media mavens or people who want to dive into the search marketing Twitter sphere.

I grouped the lists in several categories to give you a better overview:

comprehensive lists
localized lists
beyond SEO
subjective lists
special interest lists

Comprehensive Lists

Search Marketing by Danny Sullivan
Search marketing pros by Danny Sullivan himself

Search Marketing by Lee Odden
Lee Odden adds a hundred more notable search marketing personalities

Search Marketing by Matt McGee
Matt’s list is comprehensive but still manageable with about 200 people on it

The SEO List by SEOgadget
Another valuable & comprehensive SEO list, some new faces here as well

SEOs+Search Marketing by Fantomaster
This quite big list is comprised of most important SEO voices on Twitter

Localized Lists

UK SEOs by rishil
This list obviously contains only SEO professionals from the UK

SEO International by Mediadonis
This list includes SEO specialists from all over the place, not only the US/UK

Manchester SEO by shanejones
A 12 of local Manchester SEO professionals

Beyond SEO

Search and Social by DerekEdmond
A Twitter list combining the search and social media marketing voices

SEO/SEM/SMM by SEOAly
An excellent combination of the three siblings

Inbound Marketing Stars by HubSpot

Inbound marketing is more than SEO but SEO is a crucial part of it. Just the gurus here.

Subjective Lists

SEO by Kalena
This list only contains SEO industry heavy weights

SEO with no Bullshit by GuavaMarkeD
Our colleague from Guava created a list of those in the SEO industry whose advise doesn’t stink

Firehorse Friends by TheGypsy
Subjective but nonetheless insightful list by SEO and search geek TheGypsy

Rockin SEOs by AngsCopywriting
These people rock indeed, many of them can’t be found on the other lists

Special Interest Lists

TopRank’s Biglist of SEO bloggers
Lee Odden’s popular list of SEO bloggers in a Twitter list format. Very useful

SEO Companies by onreact_com
This is my list of SEO companies. Send me a tweet @onreact_com to get included

Inhouse SEO by Aaron Bradley
SEO professionals currently employed “in house” by companies outside the SEO industry

Search Industry Unknowns by JennyHalasz
10 dark horses you probably don’t know yet but should

SEO Conferences by g1smd
List of Twitter accounts by and about conferences relevant for SEO an search marketing

Following a Twitter list does not mean that all of the people followed show up in your stream. As far as I can see it you only see them once you click on the list on Twitter.com or you view the lists dialog in Seesmic. You can follow a few Twitter lists without cluttering our stream.

I’d nevertheless advise you to follow only several of the above Twitter lists as they often cover the same people anyway (I show up on a 12 of them). So choose the lists wisely you follow where the spectrum of the SEO industry you need is covered best.

You want to pick the people you follow yourself? Try this list I’ve made earlier this year.

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Twitter Friday: 20 Twitter Lists for the SEO Industry

Twitter Friday: Twitter Lists Galore!

Tad Chef — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:10:02 +0000

A lot has happened on and around Twitter since I left for a week. All those news pale in comparison to the introduction of native lists on Twitter.

We’ve used groups on advanced Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic already but this week Twitter lists went live for everybody on the Web interface at Twitter.com

The introduction of lists has been a wise move by Twitter for many reasons.

Twitter lists result in people who use Twitter apps of all kinds returning to the actual website and generate page views and clicks.

Also these lists are more than the groups we could use within Twitter clients.

You can share these lists when they are public.
You can subscribe to public lists.
You can see who’s on them.
You can see on how many lists you appear.
You can link to lists
You can invite people to join lists.

Some features you’d expect are missing as of now though:

You can’t leave lists, other put you on them.
You can’t join lists, only others can make you join.
You can’t address lists e.g. only tweet something to a list.
You can’t see whether you see a tweet based on a list subscription or because you follow that person.

Nonetheless there seems to be a real frenzy over the lists and a high adoption rate especially in the SEO industry. I ended up on a 12 lists within hours of the appearance of lists and by now the number has tripled. Other, more popular tweeple sport memberships in dozens or even hundreds of lists by now.

Are lists the new follower count? Probably, but that’s not all. Lists are a very effective tool to organize information. On Twitter they allow you to organize sources of information. These sources are people so you list people you follow.

We already can witness

postings of “lists to follow” being published.
Twitter lists directories being set up.
sharing lists is being celebrated
advice is being given on how marketers can use lists
a Twitter lists arms race being on the way
even Twitter lists humor already appearing

Indeed lists are a really useful addition to the Twitter experience especially in case you tweet for business reasons. You can now group your employees or subscribe to whole new segments of the Twitter population. Do you want to subscribe to the SEO industry on Twitter with one click? Try this list by Matt McGee.

Do you use lists already?
Are there ways to use Twitter lists we haven’t covered yet?
How can you use Twitter lists for SEO?

Tell us about it!

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Twitter Friday: Twitter Lists Galore!

The Top Search Marketing Posts This Week

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:16:58 +0000

It’s been an eventful week in the SEO blogosphere, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicting the future of real time search engine indexing, to Yahoo flushing millions of dollars of Geocities PageRank down the drain! Here’s a collection of this weeks top search marketing and social media links from around the blogosphere:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about 'the biggest challenge of the age'

SEO:

Google Web In Five Years – Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about how ranking real time social media content is ‘the biggest challenge of the age’.
Pitfalls to avoid when carrying out international SEO – Some great tips to keep in mind when carrying out SEO work for an international client.
Google’s additional discovery method – Search Engine Land talks about how Google has a updated it’s web page discovery method using RSS and Atom feeds
Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo.

Social Media:

Proof that social media is killing print magazines – An interestingly presented blog post showing how declining print press publications coincide with the rise in people seeking news online.
Googles trial and error social media strategy – SEOptimise’s blog post from earlier this week on the success and failure of the various Google services.
6 Crucial steps to prepare for real time search integration – Six great tips on how you can prepare for Yahoo’s real time search integration with Facebook and Twitter updates.
11 Ways to get more comments on your blog – Eleven ways to increase the number of comments received on your blog posts.
Missed SEO opportunities – An enjoyable case study for any SEO on how an online costume retailer recently missed a seasonal opportunity by having such a poorly optimised online presence.

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The Top Search Marketing Posts This Week

Google’s Social Media Strategy: Trial & Error

Tad Chef — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:00:02 +0000

These days it’s hard to keep up with new gimmicks presented by Google. You could spend hours or days just coming to terms with them. Most of these new services and features are in some way connected to social media. Google’s social media strategy seems to be trial and error.

We have seen many failed Google attempts to enter the social media arena in the past. Just remember

Google Answers
Google Bookmarks
Google Knol
Google Notebook
Jaiku
Google Video

These most obvious failures are accompanied by several barely existent features and tools. It’s a new kind of feature creep. Google keeps on adding new services making it too complex for most users to stay on top of them. Even we in the SEO industry can’t become experts on all Google services at once. You have to focus on a few working services and ways of using them.

Google Search
Google Analytics
GMail
Google Reader

are most probably the ones you already use. In recent weeks Google has introduced at least three new major social media services to the game

Google Profiles (updated)
Google SideWiki
Google Wave
Google Social Search

The only one that really matters in my opinion is Google Social Search but even here I doubt that it will be a widely used service as long as it’s implemented the way it is now. You can ignore Google SideWiki and Google Wave though. There was a ridiculous amount of attention wasted on both in the SEO industry and beyond. At the end of the day both services don’t add much value and will probably be used by a minuscule minority, guess who, the SEOs I guess.

Google Social Search is presented as an experiment and indeed I needed a few hours to find out what it is about. In simple terms: It’s just another layer of personalization of search results.

Google determines who your friends are and then inserts their favorites into your search results.

I have no idea why they had to introduce another new service for these features. We already have the Google SearchWiki (not the SideWiki!). Also it’s basically an extension to Google Profiles.

Confused? I am, you are probably as well and guess who is even more, the average user. Even we, the early adopters and power users grapple with these new services. John Doe doesn’t have a clue and thus care a bit.

Google Profiles has in a way been around for years. I remember setting a basic one up when I needed it for Google bookmarks 2 or 3 years ago. They ramped it up and now it’s some kind of ClaimID competition. Lisa Barone already ranted about it half a year ago. Well known search blogger Barry Schwartz has a neat profile there. What more can I say? It seems it has some use combined with Google Social Search, read on to find out about that.

Google Sidewiki is seen by some as a misguided attempt to create a parallel Internet under the corporate control of Google. Most people see it as a way to spray paint other’s websites. I see it as another niche product for a tiny target audience. Only Google Toolbar users who don’t care for privacy will use it and people interested in SEO. Where Google SearchWiki (remember the buttons on your search results?) still has some use for the average guy I don’t see much of it for SideWiki. There are of course other services to annote websites. StumbleUpon, Diigo and WOT do that in a much better ways.

Google Wave has been introduced as a Twitter competitor in the realtime arena but it’s more of a chat client based groupware. It might have some use in companies but it’s complicated and cluttered like hell, I needed an hour to make it work at all with the help of some SEO experts who had tested it before me. It’s a fancy gimmick and huge time waster. To me it’s dead on arrival. Twitter succeeded because it was simple and easy to use. Google Wave is the exact opposite. Even renowned tech veterans like Robert Scoble hate it.

Google Social Search is a promising idea but the current flawed implementation renders it almost useless. It basically takes your existing Google services and collects your connections to other users to personalize your search results. So for instance you’ll see your Google Reader subscriptions in your search results. Plus a little disturbingly you will see stuff by your GMail contacts there. This way en employer you have in your GMail address book can see what sites you like.

Asides of that you can add more services via your Google Profile (check out mine). Google Profiles also support FriendFeed importing. You are also meant to see the tweets of your Twitter friends but I don’t yet. Google Social Search might turn big but it’s still nascent and confusing. I added several services to my Google profile to no avail. I can’t see my friends’ tweets or bookmarks.

Don’t panic. The new hyped Google services will most likely be forgotten in a few months or you’ll have enough time to join and use those that will make some business sense. I’m just angry about all the time wasted on these new “services”. They are attention grabbers that don’t give back much of the value yet.

Google’s trial and error is something most people can ignore. A year from now we’ll see what’s left of those trials, mostly errors I guess. Then you can reconsider using these services. Sometimes it’s better to adopt late. especially in case you value time and money.

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Google’s Social Media Strategy: Trial & Error

What do you want from your online efforts?

Stuart Tofts — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:25:10 +0000

If you’re about to embark on an online marketing campaign, have you actually thought about what you want to achieve?

Last week, I was reading Patricio Robles’ excellent article 10 reasons people criticise SEO. Among the many comments left on the post was one suggesting that many clients don’t really know what it is they want to achieve from search engine optimisation before they start.

I think this is surprisingly true. At SEOptimise, we always encourage our clients to outline what they would consider to be success, to make sure we’re targeting our efforts. Not everyone’s goal is a straightforward commercial one.

Surprisingly often, they don’t really know and SEO is now just one more aspect of online marketing. Many organisations dutifully sign up and spend a great deal of cash of an array of web-based promotional efforts without a clear picture of what they want to achieve.

Considering how easy it is to analyse and measure online marketing success, this is an inexplicable waste of money.

More sales

This is the most obvious reason for any online marketing effort – to increase traffic to a commercial website in order to increase sales; to boost a brand’s reputation and mindshare in order to increase sales; and to encourage customers to return and make further purchases.

SEO is a key factor here; it’s the equivalent of renting a shop in the middle of a busy shopping centre – increasing footfall is key to success.

If this is your sole ambition then make sure you analyse the success of different marketing tactics, so that you can divert your budget into the most successful streams.

Recommended: Organic SEO, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, competitions and giveaways, press engagement

More visitors

If you’re a commercial organisation then you want to increase visitor numbers in order to boost sales. However, some websites simply want to increase visitor numbers – they don’t then need to convert them into anything other than repeat visitors.

This is often the case for online news sources or blogs that rely on advertising revenue.

Recommended: Organic SEO, pay-per-click advertising, press engagement

More information

There are many organisations that exist in order to capture people’s information and consent to future marketing or surveying activities.

Whether the business makes money from carrying out surveys and market research, or collects addresses for other companies to use for marketing, there’s a difficult line to tread when it comes to promoting these sites.

Often, standard marketing like SEO falls down here. These businesses must turn to more subtle efforts, like viral promotions, competition marketing and giveaways.

Simply increasing traffic will not necessarily be a cost-effective way to promote these kinds of sites.

Recommended: viral marketing, competitions and giveaways

More publicity

Okay, if you’re a pressure group or a political party, what is it you want? To boost your online publicity and make sure people have heard about you and understand what you’re about.

This is my favourite kind of marketing. Really careful use of paid advertising around searches for current affairs and relevant contentious issues can help this kind of group achieve incredible visibility.

Press releases, an authoritative and charismatic blog, a forum – there are some really fun and effective ways to boost a pressure group’s audience, whether they are a major political party or the Village Green Preservation Society.

Recommended: Pay-per-click advertising, blogging, press engagement, social media marketing

More donations

If you’re a charitable organisation, then you want to raise publicity but also revenue. In many ways, you’re more like a commercial organisation than a pressure group. Increasing footfall will help boost revenue, so SEO is a key element here.

However, increasing revenue also relies heavily on the content of your site – since there’s no product for your visitors to take home. So, the tactics outlined under ‘more publicity’ come into play – blogging, aligning yourself with current affairs and social media marketing.

Charities want reliable income streams more than anything, so much of your marketing will be directed at people who’ve already donated, to keep them giving and to increase loyalty. That means email marketing can make a big difference to your success.

Recommended: Organic SEO, Pay-per-click advertising, blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, press engagement

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What do you want from your online efforts?

Twitter Friday: Twitter as the Main Traffic Source

Tad Chef — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:29:49 +0000

Two years ago when I started using twitter I wasn’t impressed. The people came in dozens from there, even when the actual post was about Twitter itself. Later on I realized that many Twitter users do not send a proper referrer due to using some web apps or other tools instead of browsing the actual Twitter.com website.

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I notice the opposite: Some posts or even blogs altogether get more traffic from Twitter than from any other source. What about Google, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious you might ask?

Well, consider this:

Google is wary of new sites so it might take 6 months or longer before you get substantial traffic from the moloch of search. Even a blog needs a while before it gets accepted by Google.
Some people still bother to promote their sites on Digg but Digg is known to popularize mostly sources that are popular already. You are not the Daily Mail, the BBC or Ars Technica I guess so you won’t succeed very often there. Sites that don’t get popular see barely any traffic. The few winners take it all.
StumbleUpon is similar. Only certain topics get popular there and the site is very unreliable, you can have thousands of visitors for one article and only a few for the next very similar one. It depends on who stumbles you in which category and several other seemingly often random parameters.
Delicious doesn’t have a “popular” frontpage anymore. It’s just a worthless mashup of some mainstream news with a few tweets and sometimes just two bookmarks. Delicious filters blogs now. Lists of resources are not welcome anymore.

Then there is Twitter. On Twitter everything is simpler. You attract followers and friends and these people read your tweets and click your links.

There is no frontpage or weird algorithm to determine whether you are worthy of spreading a link or not on Twitter. The people decide.

There is no ban on business there like on Digg or SEOptimise where users representing businesses are prohibited. SEOptimise is very popular on Twitter, I have a bunch of followers as well, Kevin Gibbons is a Twitter maven. Together we can make many of our posts succeed on Twitter just by posting them once to our streams. This is amazing! Do you count the wasted hours spend on Digg waiting to see whether you get on the frontpage or not?

Especially new and business blogs but simple sites as well can get substantial traffic from Twitter both from your own followers as well as via other people interested in a topic. In case you have already some followers on Twitter and you start a new business blog on a new domain it’s quite likely that Twitter will became your most important referrer long before search traffic from Google arrives.

Twitter traffic is better statistically than the one stemming from other social media sources. People visiting via Twitter have gotten a recommendation by someone they follow and trust. So the bounce rate is lower than from one size fits all social news sites like Digg. Still Twitter visitors are quick and they don’t act as much as regular blog visitors or searchers. You have to invest time in some full fledged Twitter integration to make these people act in some meaningful way. There are many solutions by now to capture the conversation on Twitter and bring it back to your blog, importing comments and votes from Twitter or elsewhere for instance. Startups like

Tweetmeme
BackType
Disqus
Postrank

propose different but nonetheless similar solutions for blog integration. Which one do you use? How do you bring the conversation back from home from Twitter?

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Twitter Friday: Twitter as the Main Traffic Source

Does SEO Still Exist?

Tad Chef — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:10:27 +0000

CC: Ford Model T image by me’nthedogs

Does SEO still exist today as such? In other words: Does what people imagine to be SEO still exist in the way the people define it?

No, this is not another “SEO has no future” post.

Indeed by now we have arrived in the ominous future of SEO, at least some or maybe many of us. We don’t offer sheer SEO anymore. Search engine rankings and traffic, the defining terms of the trade are just not enough anymore if they ever have been enough. Now you might argue that SEO has not been about rankings and traffic for a while already etc.

The public doesn’t know though. People who search for an SEO definition on Google, even those savvy enough to search for define:SEO will find solely definitions of SEO dealing with search engines, rankings and traffic or rather their improvement. I want to cite a few of the most findable definitions of SEO:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”

“Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.”

“The true definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be stated as a highly specialized process of building a successful website. We say successful because if a commercial website cannot be found in the major search engines, it is not successful”

Some of the define:SEO results are even funny from the current perspective, most others simply sound very conservative:

“Search engine optimization, the use of various techniques to improve a web site’s ranking in the search engines and thus attract more visitors.”

“The process of optimizing one’s website to get better results in search engines.”

“Creating and improving a website so that it will rank high in the search engines and help potential customers or clients find the website.”

“The process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.”

Now let’s ask yourself: In case you practice or even offer SEO, what is it that you offer exactly? You might agree with these definitions above still you in most cases will do more than that.

You most probably will be active on social media not only get links but to do some online reputation management. You will also try to improve the usability of a website, it’s security and it’s conversion rate. You will not only optimize content, you will create it, not just anything but highly linkable or even viral content.

Now some will argue that there are better terms like

online or Internet marketing
search engine marketing (SEO + PPC)
search marketing

or even some more exotic terms like

inbound marketing
findability
digital asset optimization
SEO 2.0

Those terms most often include SEO as a part of them. On the other hand: Does standalone SEO still exist? Are there specialists or webmasters doing only SEO and ignoring all the other aspects most SEO people practice by now?

The SEO we have defined at the beginning is the Ford Model T of our trade.

We don’t define cars as motorized black boxes getting you from A to B. Likewise the Model T SEO of “higher rankings and more traffic” is an insufficient definition from the past. An SEO who ignores social media, usability and conversions doesn’t do enough these days.

Some people might argue that advanced SEO methods on the technical level make the good old SEO reasonable again but it’s like adding a new engine to your vintage Ford T. It still has poor aerodynamics and probably burns even more gas than a SUV.

What we do in 2009 is much more holistic.

We don’t optimize just one website or our own website/s. We optimize our web presence. We not only optimize this web presence on multiple sites and services most of which aren’t our own or search engines. We monitor and manage this holistic web presence. We shift focus depending on the tides. At the end of the day the time spend on your SEO work actually should look something like this:

analytics 1h
blogging/content creation 3h
social media participation 3h
usability & conversions (A/B split testing) 3h
classic SEO (on page, link building) 1h

Oh wait, it’s 11h of work just for “modern SEO”? What about checking emails, talking to clients, counting the money ? Don’t you ever sleep as a SEO?

You basically can’t manage all of them on a given day. Also calling all of this SEO won’t help you and your clients. When you sell them SEO they probably won’t let you do usability testing and social media. They will rather tell you “write meta tags” or “create XML sitemaps”.

Actually what we do is web presence management.

You might call it what you like but it’s certainly more then SEO and it’s more than search engine marketing or search marketing as well. It’s not solely online or Internet marketing as you do more than marketing you build actual websites and create actual content.

Does SEO as we or other the others know it still exist? Yes, but there are also a few Ford Model T left. Do people still practice solely classic SEO? I bet they do, but with each day these people become less and less. I can’t imagine you getting a high profile SEO job theses days without being on Twitter.

Don’t get we wrong. I love it when people upgrade their good old T and make a custom sports car out of it. Still, I think most of us has to move on.

CC: Ford Model T Roadster image by The Brain Toad

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Does SEO Still Exist?

Online Marketing Interview & Q&A on LBC Radio with James Max

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:52:12 +0000

Very quick post, but on Sunday evening I was on LBC Radio talking to James Max and answering caller questions about search engine marketing.

Here’s a clip from the show:

Direct YouTube link: Kevin Gibbons (SEOptimise) – Online Marketing Interview on LBC Radio.

I’m also at a4uexpo in London today, so if you’re around let me know!

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Online Marketing Interview & Q&A on LBC Radio with James Max

Twitter Friday: StumbleUpon is not Twitter

Tad Chef — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:32:02 +0000

Today I almost forgot to write my Twitter Friday column. Why? I was so preoccupied with the new relaunched StumbleUpon version. To make it short: SU attempts to compete directly with Twitter and Google. This might sound ridiculous but they really do. Theoretically it would be possible: SU exists for several years and has collected tens of millions of web pages in its “index” together with millions of reviews with new sites being added very quickly. Isn’t this the ideal social search engine? Isn’t this the perfect way to determine which websites really do matter in real time? Sadly, no.

Now this is the Twitter column so I won’t compare the new StumbleUpon to Google. Let me explain though why

StumbleUpon is not Twitter and can’t compete with Twitter.

StumbleUpon does not allow business usage of its site. Yes, you can get banned solely for submitting your SEO company website to SU.

StumbleUpon both prohibits self promotion and stumbling of commercial services. I’ve seen many legit and prolific SU users and bloggers outside of SEO getting banned for stumbling sites containing a small commercial aspect.

You must understand that before using SU. Many new users assume they can act like on Twitter and

represent their brand
submit their own postings
promote their offers

You can’t do it unless they have changed the TOS with this new version and they haven’t as far as I know. The only allowed business features of SU are stumbling sites dealing with business topics or paid advertising (sponsored stumbles) on the site.

I repeat: You are not allowed to present your own services on StumbleUpon.

There are many reasons why you aren’t: First off SU is an old school social site, meant for private users and not businesses. It’s similar to all the social sites of the first generation like Digg, Reddit or even Delicious who consider business users trying to promote something spammers by definition. Also these sites are not opt in so indeed it wouldn’t work. On Twitter only people who actively decide to follow you get your updates so you won’t have anybody complaining about you tweeting about SEO.

Instead of complaining Twitter users can simply unfollow you and never again read your Twitter updates.

While StumbleUpon is not the stupid one size fits all social news site Digg and Reddit still are on SU people see your stumbles via the toolbar who haven’t subscribed to you. They have subscribed to a topic not a person. You can subscribe and befriend people too but the toolbar stumbles are send to strangers as well. They get sent to friends of friends of friends. It happens automatically behind the scenes.

Twitter on the contrary is “what you see is what you get”, no shady sending random stuff based on proprietary schemes. Don’t get me wrong: I love the way StumbleUpon sends me stuff I might like and I often do, nonetheless I also get some content theft “funny images” blogs served etc.

There are people on StumbleUpon who will really hate you just because you submitted something they don’t want to see. Just read the angry reviews of many sponsored stumbles. Twitter in contrast is much more civilized because people choose to read about your business.

There are two more huge problems with StumbleUpon: It heavily relies on a flawed categorization and your friends don’t count.

On Twitter you tweet about a certain set of topics and corresponding people follow you: For instance people interested in SEO follow me. These people appreciate my SEO tweets plus they tolerate or sometimes even like my occasional off topic tweets. On SU it’s not that simple. The people who subscribe to the same categories as me (SEO, search, marketing e.g) might get my stumbles via the toolbar). When I stumble something about bicycling, Asia or cell phones the same people will not see it at all unless they subscribe to these categories as well. This would still work fine but it doesn’t as roughly 50% of all stumbles get miscategorized. I have seen the most bizarre miscategorizations.
Often the category is based on some word in the headline. Articles containing the word “improve” often end up in the “self improvement” category even when they describe how to improve your wireless network. So

many stumbles don’t get attention at all

because the wrong people see them who either don’t care for the issue or even hate the topic. You can’t really fix wrong categories. I send several requests each day to change them but most never get changed as the small SU team obviously has to deal with the reports manually. Even if it does change it takes ages and by then the initial stumble power has disappeared. The faster people stumble the more popular a submission gets usually.

Twitter is straightforward: You follow and befriend people and the more of them or the better your connection with them the more people you reach. On SU your friends votes don’t count. Only if strangers vote for you as well you get real traffic. So in a way the more friends you have in a niche the smaller your chances to get popular are because the less people who care about the topic get their vote counted.

So all in all StumbleUpon is the opposite of Twitter and not suited for business usage.

From the business perspective it can’t compete with Twitter at all. From the SEO perspective Twitter already sends more traffic in many cases than SU, especially if you submit stuff dealing with SEO a topic only a tiny group of users on SU has subscribed to.

In the new SU design you can see the number of “views” any submission has. This just reinforces my impression that most of them don’t get any views at all. Just look at screenshot above showing my discoveries. Please note that I’m a SU power user for more than 2 years and having 800+ subscribers. The SEOptimise post on the screenshot is an exception, I shared it with my friends via the toolbar so they had to see it.

In 2009 you can’t ignore or ban business users, the most succesful social sites allow both business and private usage.

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Twitter Friday: StumbleUpon is not Twitter

30 Twitter Tools for Business

Tad Chef — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:32:59 +0000

How do you use Twitter for business? This question has been answered manifold times. What tools do you use for business though? There aren’t that many business tools for Twitter it seems. You rather should ask:

Which tools enable professionals best to use Twitter for business?

This way you may find more useful tools and apps. Nonetheless there are some valuable specialized Twitter tools for business you should try. I compiled a list of both, Twitter tools for business and professional Twitter tools. Most of them are free but some advanced ones, especially in the CRM arena are not.

Desktop Twitter Clients
Many people use the Twitter homepage for tweeting. Indeed I do often as well but for many tasks, especially in a business context an advanced client indispensable. I have tried a dozen of them and these three are among the best for professional users.

TweetDeck, perhaps the most popular professional Adobe Air client for Twitter. Supports, searches, groups, multiple accounts
SeesMic is like Tweetdeck but less buggy and with a more polished interface. TweetDeck never really worked on my system.
Statuzer is similar to the above but with added multimedia support

Web Based Twitter Clients and CMS
Even with a desktop client like one of the above working in teams is difficult. Web based tools offer even more features for teams and companies

HootSuite, a web based Twitter CMS for companies
coTweet (Twitter CRM?) – coTweet has been hailed as a Twitter CRM app but it’s basically a Twitter CMS with very basic CRM features
Twaitter allows team accounts, scheduled tweets, RSS integration etc.
Tweetvisor is a horribly cluttered but very powerful Twitter interface or web based Twitter client

CRM/Social CRM/TRM (Twitter Relationship Management)
In case you are serious about business you most probably use some kind of CRM tools for customer relationship management. Both CRM software makers and new kids on the block attempt to harness Twitter conversations to get more leads and organize a better customer service. CRM solutions supporting Twitter are still rare though. At least one, Axopt already disappeared.

CureCRM – Twitter and Email bases CRM
Salesforce Service Cloud supports Twitter
IGOpeople Twitter CRM business suite
Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a Twitter “accelerator” integration

Twitter Directories
One of the most common questions people new to Twitter ask is: Who to follow on Twitter? In order to some quick overview of who might be the right person to follow in your industry or niche you should check out Twitter directories like Twellow.

Twellow – Twitter “Yellow Pages”, one of the oldest and most reputable Twitter user directories
JustTweetIt is a clean and web directory with many users, some of which I recognize. The top result for SEO, Dev Basu is a well known local SEO expert.
Geofollow – Location based Twitter directory covering the whole planet
Twibes is not really a directory it’s rather a collection of Twitter groups based on interests

Twitter Enhancements
Twitter has only ver basic features, even Twitter clients offer only a few more. there are literally thousands of tools that enhance Twitter in one way or another. here I can mention only some notable among them that are ideyll suited for busines people.

TwitterLocal allows you to address local audiences via Twitter, ideal for small businesses
Social Oomph (formerly Tweet Later) is a tool with multiple features, some of clients some of extra tools, scheduling and automating tweets are just two of them
Twaitter is like Social Oomph but with less features which doesn’t mean it’s less useful
PingFM allows to submit links to Twitter, Facebook and numerous other services at once
PeopleBrowsr is a very powerful suite of tools for creating and addressing groups and beyond

Twitter Search and Monitoring Tools
Twitter users produce huge amounts of data you impossibly can be digest or overview as a human being. Even your followers tweets are too much in most cases. search and monitoring tools make sure that you don’t miss something important.

Topsy finds and sorts most of your brand’s mentions, tweets and links
Yahoo Sideline is a Adobe Air based desktop search tool for Twitter. It also displays current trends
Twilert – Like Google Alerts for Twitter mentions, catches most of them
TweetBeep – Similar to Twilert but less reliable. Good to find additional mentions Twilert overlooks but not enough on it’s own
Radian6 – This is an advanced social media analytics suite with some Twitter tools also useful for CRM
Twitturly – shows the most popular Twitter links in a social news like interface
Tweetreach – Find out who really is your friend, or at least who spread your message the most

Blog Tools
Being on Twitter is good for business but integrating it into your website or rather blog is even better. Many tools attempt to do that but only a few of them are good enough for business users.

Twittercounter – A Feedburner like counter showing you the number of Twitter followers, SEOptimise uses one
BackType Plugins allow you a seamless Twitter integration into your blog
Twitter Tools by Alex King allows almost complete Twitter integration into your WordPress blog

You may also want to check out some of these resources for more Twitter business tools:

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30 Twitter Tools for Business

Cervical cancer, vaccines and social SEO

Stuart Tofts — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:52:51 +0000

The press coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been unpleasant to watch and brought back memories of the MMR vaccine hysteria.

Although the press may regret the damage they have (once again) done, the Google results could remain filled with flawed information for a long time because of this.

Some of the dangerous articles have been exceptionally popular and, of course, those people who believe in a big pharma conspiracy have been linking to them and driving them up in the search engine results pages.

Well, one SEO professional has had a pretty good idea. Writing for Econsultancy (an industry source Kevin often writes for), Malcolm Coles suggests we try to boost the NHS’s ranking by linking to it within posts like this.

I don’t know if a few SEO bloggers can make enough of a difference and I urge the NHS to review its optimisation efforts. However, if linking to official pages using phrases like cervical cancer immunisation has a chance of helping, then I’m happy to try.

Do take Malcom’s suggestions on board and link to these pages using relevant phrases, as I have done here.

Let’s not see another wave of youngsters missing out on an important preventative treatment.

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Cervical cancer, vaccines and social SEO

10 Tips to Boost your Flickr Profile

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:00:38 +0000

Last week I wrote 10 tips to optimise your LinkedIn profile, this week I’ve decided to follow on from that with 10 tips to getting started with Flickr. This is meant as a guide to show how you can use Flickr’s photo sharing to generate traffic, optimise for the search engines, build your reputation and gain SEO value.

Image credit: murilocardoso

The popularity of photo sharing is huge, with 3 billion Flickr photos online (last November) and over 2,800 uploads during the last minute (this stat is continually updated on Flickr.com). So the potential traffic is very high if you have a popular profile - here are my top Flickr tips:

Optimise your images – This doesn’t have to require a large amount of effort, but if you can dedicate some time towards optimising your images by uniquely naming your photos, adding tags and descriptions this can go a long way towards increasing the traffic driven to your images. I’d also recommend uploading the highest quality images possible, unlike Facebook where a small image is normally fine, Flickr will provide multiple sizes of your photo – so a high quality image would look better in this case, providing your broadband speed isn’t too slow!
Promote your Flickr profile – There are various blog plugins, widgets and Facebook apps which allow you to show a showreel of your photos. I’d also recommend making the most of social media sites by submitting your best photos to social bookmarking sites. For example, StumbleUpon is frequently submitted with good images from Flickr. Plus you can use Twitter to show your latest photos by dropping a link into one of your tweets.
Use images within blog posts – Use your own images, when relevant, within blog posts – linking back to the image on Flickr to generate traffic to your profile. This will encourage clickthroughs and possibly generate friend requests, favourite votes and comments for your images and profile. This is something I’ve done in the past to use travel photos from my personal account, or company photos from the SEOptimise profile.
Join & upload to relevant groups – Start joining and uploading your best images to relevant groups. Helping to generate traffic from users who are likely to have an interest in your photos.
Make your photos creative commons licensed – I’ve written before about how you can find great images on Flickr to use for blogging. Apply the same principles to your own photos, allowing bloggers to find your images and use them (if they wish to) on their own blog posts.
Encourage image credit links – Include copyright terms or a polite comment within the description of your images, this is to ask users to provide a link back to the original source to credit your image. Normally this would be a direct link to the image on Flickr, but better still why not try asking for a link to your own website? You could also watermark your images, this obviously has no direct SEO value – but it does ensure your image is credited and may result in traffic.
Create a company profile – Help to build your own reputation and company image by displaying team photos and images from events which employees may have attended. Here’s an example from the SEOptimise Flickr account, this helps to show a personal side to a company and may help to attract potential clients/customers or new employees. Plus this may rank for a query on your company name, so can be a good listing to help control your online reputation.
Sign-up for a pro account – If you have a large collections of photos, I would definitely recommend signing up for a pro account. This is very cheap and allows you to organise your into more sets and collections, in addition to extra storage space, stats and removal of ads.
Analyse your stats – This is for pro accounts, but the stats in Flickr can be very interesting. Find out where your Flickr traffic is coming from – whether this is via internal searches, search engines, Google Images or referring sites – you should be able to quickly spot some trends and find new ways to optimise your images and maximise your current traffic.
Add contacts – Don’t overdo this, but by adding contacts who share a similar interest and by adding some of their best images as faves you are increasing the chances that your own images will receive fave votes and comments. This will help your images to rank highly for competitive queries within Flickr as they will be viewed as being more interesting.

Final tip, take great photos! This really is what’s going to make the difference, but the above ideas can certainly help to get these discovered far more easily. So what are your top tips?

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10 Tips to Boost your Flickr Profile

Twitter Friday: The Twitter Effect

Tad Chef — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:00:56 +0000

Do you remember a site called Digg? This is a site that has been very successful in 2006. A few years earlier a site called Slashdot was that popular. Both sites exist today and are used by some fringe groups. Back in their heydays they have been notorious for their “effect”, like in “Slashdot effect” or “Digg effect”.

It basically meant that in the best or rather worst case your website was taken down by a huge number of users accessing your site at the same time. It happened when your site went popular on the respective frontpages.

In 2009 the frontpage metaphor taken from newspapers has been overcome. There is no real frontpage on Twitter. There is only a stream or a myriad of streams. Still some tweets or links get popular here as well.

You can follow popular Twitter items using a social news Twitter mashup like Tweetmeme. You don’t have to though. Most people just follow their friend’s news and that’s what Twitter was designed for.

Still some people are more popular than others and act like a kind of frontpage. You have well known real life celebrities with millions of followers and you have people known for their Web endeavors who still have tens of thousands of followers. There is one difference though:

The Hollywood, sports or music celebs have low value followers, people who barely can use the Web in many cases and who probably don’t even know what a retweet is.

On the other hand you have web authorities like Guy Kawasaki of Alltop or Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine. These people get followers who not only follow but act as well. Highly knowledgeable web workers in many cases.

A few days ago Guy Kawasaki tweeted a link to my blog and it was retweeted dozens of times. I got more than 1000 visitors from his tweet directly or by retweets. This does not sound like much you could say but today the Twitter effect made my hosting company upgrade my hosting plan to a dedicated server to handle the load.

Usually I’m on shared hosting with my blog. Within 3 hours after the @smashingmag tweet the URL got tweeted more than 70 times by others. They were mostly retweets but many people clicked my Twitter button or entered the URL themselves.

Both posts that got tweeted were older ones so you really could see the influence of one Twitter user as nobody else tweeted them at the same time. You never know how many visitors you get from Twitter unless you create and track a campaign with analytics as most of them show no referer or don’t get counted for looking like a bot. There are plenty of Twitter clients (Firefox add ons, iPhone apps, desktop software) people use so that’s no wonder. bit.ly shows more than 3k clicks but other URL shorteners have been used as well.

Now I’m not the only one who already experienced the Twitter effect. In 2009 it’s so common that even Hollywood fears it. No, their servers are bigger than my hosting package. They fear the content or rather discontent of the tweets dealing with new movies and the quick viral spread of them. Good movies get more viewers due to Twitter, bad movies fail at the box office.

So what does this mean for you? You need to protect your site from the Twitter effect nowadays. It can get “attacked” by a large number of users anytime on any post or page. On Digg it was only after several hours of waiting in line and each URL only once. On Twitter it can happen within minutes out of nowhere and a week later on the same page. Preparing for Digg was simple, in many cases you submitted your page yourself.

SEOptimise already changed its hosting company a few weeks ago due to instability. You might consider upgrading your hosting plan as well. I already do.

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Twitter Friday: The Twitter Effect

10 Tips to Optimise your LinkedIn Profile

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:55:05 +0000

A question I get commonly asked by clients is should they be using LinkedIn and is there any SEO value in creating a profile? Well the answer to both is almost always yes, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to write up my top tips.

Image credit: Flickr

LinkedIn in my opinion, is one of the few social media websites every professional should be using. There are many advantages to using LinkedIn, as listed by Guy Kawasaki. Plus unlike many sites where it can be time-consuming to build up and maintain a popular profile, LinkedIn requires far less effort. You can obviously use it more frequently if you’d like, but it’s not as necessary as it would be for other social media sites.

So once you’ve signed up and registered your account, here’s ten tips we recommend to optimise your account:

Fully complete your profile – Ensuring that this contains all relevant career history and interests. LinkedIn makes this easy by displaying a percentage score to show how complete your profile is. A LinkedIn profile basically acts as an online CV, so make sure you’re being honest and describing yourself and career clearly.
Edit profile to claim vanity URL – This should be set to use your name (or closest match if unavailable) within the URL, for example: www.linkedin.com/in/kevingibbons – this will help you to optimise your own name in the search engines and also makes the URL easier to remember if promoted on business cards or email signatures.
Make your profile publicly available – You can set the information which is publicly available to non-members/contacts, be careful with blocking too much information as this will also be unavailable to the search engines. As a minimum, I would recommend providing enough information for the search engines to index your profile and cache the external links you have listed! In terms of optimising your profile, the main goals are normally to rank for your own name, company name and possibly industry keywords related to this.
Make connections – Increase the reach of your profile by connecting with current and former work colleagues, clients, friends and family. I’d also recommend adding any industry contacts, perhaps from people you have met at conferences/events or are connected with on other social media sites and share a similar interest.
Request recommendations – Obviously don’t ask everyone, especially if you don’t know them that well. But having recommendations will help your profile to stand out and will help to build trust in your reputation to visiting users. This will help improve the visibility of your own profile within internal LinkedIn searches too.
Register a company profile – If your company doesn’t already have a company listing, you should create one! Here’s an example of the SEOptimise company profile, if your company does have a profile, you should encourage employees to create their own individual LinkedIn profile’s and ensure the current employer entry is completed. This will automatically update all employees listed on the company profile, providing the company name is exactly matched.
Make use of the 3 website hyperlinks – For SEO value, LinkedIn is very good – they give you the opportunity to add three hyperlinks to websites of your choice. If you’re not trying to optimise your site for “My Website”, “My Portfolio” and “My Blog” it might be an idea to select “Other” and choose your own anchor text instead!
Join related groups – Find groups where other industry professionals have joined and look to participate in (or at least join) these groups. Adding value to your own profile and helping you to get found by other industry contacts.
Use LinkedIn Answers – This can help to build up your reputation within a field. For SEO it also builds the number of internal links pointing to your profile from within LinkedIn, therefore helping to strengthen your profile in the search engines!
Optimise your job title – LinkedIn now includes your job title within profile title tags. I’m not saying you should lie about your job, but within reason you could include descriptive keywords which may help to attract relevant search engine traffic. For example, using “SEO Account Manager” as a job title instead of “Account Manager”, if appropriate.

So these are my tips, if you have any of your own please leave them in the comments. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn too.

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10 Tips to Optimise your LinkedIn Profile

Establishing Web Credibility

Tad Chef — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:56:32 +0000

After discovering a paper on establishing web credibility on the Web [PDF] published by Stanford University in 2001 I was astounded by the timelessness of Web credibility. While you might imagine that a study conducted 8 years ago would be outdated by now like IE6, the browser every developer loves to hate, the main points, even the examples of the research are still valid. You might add some new sites or factors but the main pillars of creating a successful website and web based business are still the same.

Foremost you need credibility on the Web to be taken seriously. Even more than that, you need credibility to be taken into account at all.

Sadly the website that collected the Web credibility research, Webcredibility.org is down by now. It seems it stopped operating in 2008 according to the last Archive.org version. Nonetheless Archive.org allows you to view such precious documents as the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. According to the site

“These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people.”

This is a substantial number, big enough to be treated as both empirical and representative of the larger public.

I’d like to reproduce the guidelines here and to offer you new examples or ways to implement these credibility guidelines. While the original ones are still valid I’d like to provide some current views on that implementation. To make my examples more credible I provided links to sources that take an in depth look at each factor.

Guidelines	Examples of Implementation	Links
1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.	Link to sites that are credible as sources. Wikipedia is not really a credible source e.g.	Link out? Linking out is good Linking to Wikipedia Linking out: Common sense
2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.	Report from real life activities like trade fairs.
3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.	Highlight instances of speaking at conferences, contributions to industry publications, interviews for industry, local or national media.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.	Blog personally and admit mistakes, react to criticism in a constructive manner “We’ll fix that”.	Personal Branding Through Your Blog Recovering from an Online Reputation Crisis
5. Make it easy to contact you.	Put your phone number on a top spot on every page, use a live chat tool. Enable Skype and IM communication. Use an accessible “contact us” form.	Contact info: how, what and where? Providing contact details
6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).	Use consistent colors and fonts. Make the copy readable. Allow the reader’s eyes to rest by adding lots of white space.	Website Basics Font Readability Study The Value Of White Space
7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.	Keep it simple and don’t make users think. The less choices you offer the easier it gets to use it. Hide additional features and content at first, don’t force everything on a page or the front page. Offer valuable resources or tools.	Keep it simple Create useful websites Help Your Website Convert
8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).	Either add new content regularly or review your old one frequently by adding resources, fixing broken links and making sure your offers are not obsolete.	Fresh Content How to Keep Content Fresh
9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).	Don’t oversell. Let people contact you and allow those who seek your services in the first place to buy but don’t convince casual visitors aggressively.	Inbound Marketing
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.	Check site uptimes. Read your own RSS feeds on several readers, check broken links regularly, employ professional translators.	Server Uptime Affects SEO Broken Links and SEO

Smashing Magazine recently published a similar set of guidelines for usability. While concentrating on details of website design like form captions they made Web credibility part of it and unearthed the Stanford studies.

In order to achieve the highest possible Web credibility you should both heed the original advice from the Stanford researchers as well as the modern examples I listed above to provide a more current perspective. Establishing Web credibility should be part of every SEO campaign.

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Establishing Web Credibility

Twitter Friday: The Tweet that Kills Your Account

Tad Chef — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:16:30 +0000

While I have written several times already that Twitter or any other social site might ban you out of the blue it just happened to Rishi Lakhani aka @rishil, a well known SEO figure on social media. I even recommended following him on my SEO Twitter users list. Another SEO, @louisventer got banned alias suspended on Twitter due to “strange activity” for the same reason, he has retweeted the tweet that kills your account:

Of course I just speculate but that’s the only reason I can see for such a legit user getting suspended unless you assume that Twitter hates SEOs. @louisventer did tweet only three times afterwards so it was easy to spot:

Quick piece of advice:

Don’t tweet or retweet URLs of scam sites or suspected scam sites.

I made the same mistake a few days ago with the same scam but on another URL. Luckily I haven’t been banned.

Now @rishil is back up after getting major support from all over the place by SEO industry peers. This wave of solidarity showed the impact the search marketing crowd has on social media. It amazed me and made me proud at the same time. Here you have people who in most cases haven’t even met once and then they employ group pressure to redeem a member of the group. A group that is neither official nor even a real group, just a few hundred people scattered all over the world. Nonetheless they cooperated to get @rishil reinstated and it worked in a matter of 24 hours.

@louisventer of MediaVison hasn’t been that lucky. He hasn’t got as many supporters to raise a hell, 392 as you can see in the Google Cache. His account is still banned. Will the SEO industry have enough influence to get him back as well? I’m not sure.

This story exemplifies a few things:

You need to be independent from social sites as they can ban you any time
You need to create a strong personal brand on social media to be able to gain support
Your success on social sites is very volatile, it may disappear in a snap
Your time and effort investment on third party sites is only as good as your own assets

Sadly I was too busy getting banned elsewhere (I’ll blog that next week on SEO 2.0) to notice the short disappearance of @rishil until he announced his come back but maybe I can help Luis Venter/@louisventer. Why should we help him as well? In case he does not get unsuspended more of us will probably face the same problem in the future.

Please RT: Bring back Louis Venter alias @louisventer now! #louisventer http://bit.ly/1HQNHY

Disclaimer: I don’t know Louis Venter, he in a way is a competitor of SEOptimise but he’s also a colleague who deserves support.

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Twitter Friday: The Tweet that Kills Your Account