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When the clock struck midnight on January 1st, I began running. It was a 5k run in Philadelphia, along the Schuylkill River, to be more specific. During this run, I passed a homeless man. Rather than running past him, I stopped. I gave him $100. Later that day, I stopped to think in greater detail about that incident. What was it that compelled me to engage him? I think the answer to that question, in this case, should be fairly obvious. The night was cold and rainy. No person should be outside and homeless, regardless of how they got there. How does this story relate to my thoughts on many folks on Twitter? Before I continue, please understand I am in no way making light of the homeless. I’m simply offering background as to what inspired the following thought: Many individuals all around the social media world are simply asking for handouts. Think about that for a second. How many people do their best to be placed prominently in front of you, but really do very little to offer a value proposition? How many individuals clamor daily about social media strategies, and the need for engagement, yet fail to offer an answer to the simple question of why you should contribute to their success? I find more and more redundancy invading my personal space. Less substance, less value, less originality, more noise. While there is overwhelming concern about those that are not participating in social media ‘correctly’, there is a disproportionate lack of concern for those that are considered social media ‘geniuses’ and really offer minimal value. If you’re going to be successful long term using social media, you must be certain that your product can back up your mouth. With that in mind, follow along and below you’ll find a small list with tips to help you, or your product, offer a compelling value proposition. 10 Ways to Translate Social Media Success into Real World
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We know your New Year’s celebration may not be or should not be over yet. Most of us are still probably recuperating from last night’s revelry. So, what come’s after New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day celebrations, bowl games and lots and lots of food? How about starting to plan the things that we want to do this year? The bad habits that we’ve been trying to break, or the things that we’ve always wanted to do. You know what I’m driving at – it’s time to make our New Year’s resolution. So, what’s it going to be this year? What are the New Year’s Resolutions that you are going to break this year? More link love, comments and retweets to SEJ posts perhaps? If you have not idea yet what would be on your list or if this is the first time that you’re going to make a New Year’s Resolution, you might want to check out this New Year’s Resolution Guide which also features professional advice from University of Maryland experts. Another good guide is this guide on How to Make a New Year’s Resolution and Keep It . It might help you fulfill your New Year’s resolution in 2010. If after reading those guides and you still couldn’t start writing your list, here are some good examples of specific New Year’s resolution which seems feasible, practical and doable. 12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 by our friends at Search Engine Land would be most useful for social media companies and gives advices such as spending more of traditional ad budget improvment of customer service, to training and educating of works, among others. Five New Year’s Resolution for SMBs – tips that can serve as sample resolutions that can guide SMB’s social media and online strategies Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions – gives practical New Year’s Resolution which are geared for personal improvement. Popular New Year’s Resolution – if you’re interested to find out what other people are putting on their New Year’s Resolution, here are the most popular ones. And while you’re at it, you might want to check out some New Year’s quotes from the QuoteGarden . So, there you go some resources that can help you find New Year’s Resolutions online. You might also want to check out the top 10 tools sticking to your New Year’s resolution. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Find New Year’s Resolutions
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Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine. Well, I’m not one of those. It’s absolutely in your best interest to learn the basics of social media before risking your time and money. Jumping into social media without at least learning the basics could be a major disaster. It probably won’t ruin your company. It probably won’t ruin you. But it will be a waste of time. Why do I say that? Well an understanding of social media theory and fundamentals makes your strategy better. How, you ask? Well… 1. It Helps You Create a Starting and End Point Taking the time to learn social media fundamentals gives you a starting point. It helps you decide where you are and hopefully where you should go. If you don’t learn what the marketing technique is, how will you know what it’s capable of? How can you create goals and work towards them? Taking the time to explore social media and soak up as much information as possible gives you a better understanding of what social media can do and how to create a plan. 2. Knowledge Leads to Fewer Mistakes On social media, a misstep can spread just as fast as a good campaign and consumers can be less than forgiving. Learning how to interact and promote a business shouldn’t endanger the brand. Start with baby steps. Minimize the likelihood of something to go wrong. Learn as much as you can about web culture and online customer service. Online consumers expect something much different than offline customers. You should know how to deliver it. 3. Experience Comes With Time – Who Has the Time? Remember the common phrase, “don’t reinvent the wheel?” – Well don’t do it. Marketers have been testing and exploring social media theories and sharing them online. Why would you want to go through that powerful information and have to learn it on your own? You can test and explore and research your content, but we know that more often than not list posts go viral. There’s no need for you to take the time to test and explore that. Take advantage of other’s experiences to bolster your marketing. Don’t try to recreate or “re-find” what others have already shown works. Save your time for actual marketing. 4. Learning Keeps You From Getting Frustrated Think back to your childhood. If you’re anything like me, than math class was a horror. I’d sit there trying to do a problem and just not knowing how. After a few minutes of trying, I’d get frustrated and give up. It wasn’t until someone taught me what to do and explained to me why it is that way that I began to enjoy math. Social media is the same way. There are fundamentals and there are strategies that you should know and understand. Don’t allow frustration lead to you giving up. We know social media is a powerful marketing tool. Don’t let it go. 5. How Are You Investing In Something You Know Little About? It all comes down to money. How are you supposed to decide how much to invest in social media if you don’t know what it can do? Learn what you’ll need to invest, both time and money, before throwing resources at it. Have a plan and create a budget. This will help increase the likelihood of success. Information is key. To have a positive social media strategy you need to know as much as possible. That means both in regards to social media knowledge as well as strategies and fundamentals. How are others in your industry doing? Why did their campaigns work? How can you recreate their success without copying them verbatim? Is social media for you? If you don’t understand these fundamentals or have this information you’re marketing with a disadvantage. I’d love to know what you think. How are you learning social media? Where do you go for research and strategies? Are you learning from example or creating your own ideas? Check out Samir Balwani’s new social media guide at Training Social , a resource for anyone interested in learning social media marketing. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 5 Reasons to Learn Social
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Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Eric Schmidt’s interview on CNBC has even provoked various sentiments on privacy issues. I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook.Com has an excellent take on this one. Personally, I agree with Kalena Jordan’s conclusion on whether or not SEO can exist beyond personalization , in which she said: Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference. The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. And then there’s the launch of Real-Time search results from Google (just a few days after the rollout of personalized search). So expect conversations your favorite social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. However, I wasn’t surprise to see some questionable results in the early stages. But I won’t go on explaining what these two features mean for Search Engine Optimization. After a few weeks of reading experts’ views on the topic, by now you already know what it does for our users, what challenges it poses to us SEO’s, and what benefits Google gains out of these intriguing additions. Instead let me show you how we can still win the battle for search rankings with these new set of rules. Why don’t we explore our weapons in modern warfare? 1. Quality Content with Value – Ever since I started out as a SEO content writer 4 years ago, I’ve always been a believer in the “Content is King” school of thought. But SEO has evolved so much that great content may not be enough. Thus, you have the popular viral content and link baiting trends. I believe in today’s context, content should be beyond quality, relevancy and link worthiness. Let’s just say you’re a movie website and you want to drive visitors to your AVATAR page (oh Yes, It was phenomenal!). Typically, you’d be providing a brief synopsis of the film, movie ratings, and screening times. Will that be enough? Well you should throw in a video trailer, a listing of local cinemas in the area featuring the film, movie reviews from selected bodies like Rotten Tomatoes, tickets and seats reservation system, or maybe a list snack items your visitors might want to grab while watching (maybe that’s a bit too much, but hey it’s possible). You don’t have to be a one-stop shop website, but your site must be what your customers need and even more. Great content will not be merely something to read and understand. Great content will be something tangible, something that customers can act upon, something that entices emotion, something that is real and beyond just characters in a white space. 2. Increase ClickThrough Rate – Personalized search will mean effectively manipulating influencing your users to click on your listing. Of course you can always conduct your own tests and come up with your own tactics to exploit personalized search . Here’s one simple tip: improve your page titles and your meta descriptions. These elements will reflect how you’ll appear on the SERP’s. Your description should inform your customers who you are and what you can deliver. If you can add a call to action line in less than 160 characters of your description, you’re off on a great start. If you can capture your customers in the first 3 lines of your search listing, you’re definitely a mile ahead of the competition. 3. Brand & Online Reputation Management – When we do research on certain topics, we tend to look for sources coming from brands even though they might be beyond page 1 of our searches. In the same way we try to avoid clicking through listings which come from dubious providers despite their top positions in the results pages. The reason being – TRUST. People trust brands. People trust businesses, individuals, and groups who have made the effort of developing their brands and delivering no less than the best to their customers. You may have won the battle for the top rankings but if you’re sitting beside the big fish in your niche market, they’ll definitely choose the neighboring giant. 4. Get Active on Social Media – This goes without saying. Even before rumors of real-time search came to life, marketing, PR, and online professionals have taken advantage of social media to its fullest potential. Well for those who haven’t, now is the time to get cracking on social media optimization (SMO). If not for real-time search, then you’ve got more reasons to embrace social media in 2010 . It would be naïve for us to think that we didn’t see this coming. Personalized and real-time search was definitely the next step for Google (and probably for the rest of the search engines). And we, as SEO’s, are expected to rise up to the occasion to do what we do best – to quickly adapt to the environment and to deliver the right results. Dave is currently working as an SEO Analyst for Nurture3 , and online marketing company based in Dubai, leading a team of junior SEO?s optimizing in-house web projects. He is also the author of Click-Dubai.Com , which talks about the basic functions of organic search engine optimization and its importance in the Middle East & GCC markets. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How SEOs Win the War on Personalized & Real-Time
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Welcome to another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – First off, HAPPY HOLIDAYs to all those partaking. May you and yours have a safe and relaxing time! Now, I had thought things would start to slow down as we got closer to the holidays, but not so. We had a lot of interesting posts, patents and toys out there, although there was no real ‘big story’ for once (c’mon Google, yer slipping). And away we go…..
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Twitter is all the rage, but you don’t need me to tell you that. So, yes, this is another Twitter article. But hang in there, it’s a good one! Lately I’m hearing mixed reviews about the success companies are having with Twitter. After my own successes with Twitter, I was a little surprised, so I decided to dig a little deeper to try to find out why some are having success and others aren’t. Ready for what I found? I found that the people that are really participating are getting the benefit and those that aren’t don’t see much benefit! Wow! Imagine that. LOL OK, so there is no surprise there, but it’s still interesting. It tells me there are a lot of people out there that understand Twitter is important but they don’t know why. I suspect a lot of people think just being there is enough – just having a presence is all they need. I’m seeing great Twitter background pages and great bios and a handful of interesting tweets and then it stops there. Just being on Twitter isn’t enough. You have to participate. Join the conversation. Create conversation. It’s like getting all dressed up and heading to a party and then sitting in the corner by yourself not talking to anyone all night. While you may start the evening like that, just sitting back scoping things out – eventually, if you want to have a good time, you have to join the party. So c’mon in and join the Twitter party. J I know we are all busy, I know growing a business online has gotten harder. I often hear “you mean I have to do SEO, be on Facebook, write and syndicate articles, Blog regularly AND tweet???” My response is no you don’t have to. If you aren’t looking to aggressively grow your business and use all the tools available to you, then you can pick and choose what you want to do. Any of those strategies will work for you on their own, but the key is when combined they work so well together and you get a much bigger impact. It’s building on top of your efforts rather than a single pronged approach. I know it’s a lot of work. It’s also new. We’ve never marketed like this before. It’s confusing for beginners. So, here is a quick overview of some of the tips that my clients have found most helpful. Getting Started: Understand Your
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I am sure Googlers should be enjoying this: hardly can they say a word, there follows a wealth of guessed and speculations. This time Matt Cutts is said to have mentioned that their 200 variables in Google algorithm and already plenty of people started looking for them. Anyway, I stumbled across this forum thread and made up my mind to share this discussion at SEJ by providing my own list of variables and asking you to contribute. Currently there are fewer than 120 variables in the list, try to make it 200 
Parameters we are almost sure (with different level of confidence) to be included in the algorithm (for your convenience I linked some of them to our previous discussions on the topic): Domain: 11 factors Domain age ; Length of domain registration; Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk ); Site top level domain (e.g. . com versus . info ); Sub domain or root domain? Domain past records (how often it changed IP); Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed) Keywords in the domain ; Domain IP ; Domain IP neighbors ; Domain external mentions (non-linked) Server-side: 2 factors Server geographical location; Server reliability / uptime Architecture: 6 factors URL structure ; HTML structure; Semantic structure ; Use of external CSS / JS files; Website structure accessibility (use of inaccessible navigation, JavaScript, etc); “Correct” HTML code (?). Content: 10 factors Content language Content uniqueness; Amount of content (text versus HTML); Unlinked content density (links versus text); Pure text content ratio (without links, images, code, etc) Content topicality / timeliness (for seasonal searches for example); Semantic information (phrase-based indexing and co-occurring phrase indicators) Content flag for general category (transactional, informational, navigational) Content / market niche Flagged keywords usage (gambling, dating vocabulary) Internal Cross Linking : 5 factors # of internal links to page; # of internal links to page with identical / targeted anchor text; # of internal links to page from content (instead of navigation bar, breadcrumbs, etc); # of links using “nofollow” attribute; (?) Internal link density, Website factors: 6 factors Website Robots.txt file content Overall site update frequency; Overall site size (number of pages); Age of the site since it was first discovered by Google XML Sitemap; On-page trust flags Page-specific factors: 9 factors Page meta Robots tags; Page age; Page freshness (Frequency of edits and % of page effected (changed) by page edits); Content duplication with other pages of the site ( internal duplicate content ); Page content reading level ; (?) Page load time; Page type (About-us page versus main content page); Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has); Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site); Keywords usage and keyword prominence : 11 factors Keywords in the title of a page; Keywords in the beginning of page title; Keywords in Alt tags; Keywords in anchor text of internal links ( internal anchor text ); Keywords in anchor text of outbound links (?); Keywords in bold and italic text (?); Keywords in the beginning of the body text; Keywords in body text; Keyword synonyms relating to theme of page/site; Keywords in filenames; Keywords in URL. Outbound links: 6 factors Number of outbound links (per domain); Number of outbound links (per page); Quality of pages the site links in; Links to bad neighborhoods; Relevancy of outbound links; Links to 404 and other error pages. Backlink profile: 20 factors Relevancy of sites linking in; Relevancy of pages linking in; Quality of sites linking in; Quality of web page linking in; Backlinks within network of sites ; Co-citations (which sites have similar backlink sources); Link profile diversity: Anchor text diversity; Different IP addresses of linking sites, Geographical diversity, Different TLDs, Topical diversity, Different types of linking sites (logs, directories, etc); Diversity of link placements Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc) Per Inbound Link Backlinks from bad neighborhoods (absence / presence of backlinks from flagged sites) Reciprocal links ratio (relevant to the overall backlink profile); Social media links ratio (links from social media sites versus overall backlink profile); Backlinks trends and patterns (like sudden spikes or drops of backlink number) Citations in Wikipedia and Dmoz; Backlink profile historical records (ever caught for link buying/selling, etc). Each Separate Backlink: 6 factors Authority of TLD ( .com versus .gov ) Authority of a domain linking in Authority of a page linking in Location of a link (footer, navigation, body text) Anchor text of a link (and Alt tag of images linking) Title attribute of a link (?) Visitor Profile and Behavior: 6 factors Number of visits; Visitors’ demographics ; Bounce rate; Visitors’ browsing habits (which other sites they tend to visit) Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spiked in incoming traffic) How often the listing is clicked within the SERPs (relevant to other listings) Penalties , Filters and Manipulation: 10 factors Keyword over usage / Keyword stuffing; Link buying flag Link selling flag; Spamming records (comment, forums, other link spam); Cloaking; Hidden Text ; Duplicate Content (external duplication) History of past penalties for this domain History of past penalties for this owner History of past penalties for other properties of this owner (?) More Factors (6): Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools; Domain presence in Google News; Domain presence in Google Blog Search; Use of the domain in Google AdWords; Use of the domain in Google Analytics; Business name / brand name external mentions. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Let’s Try to Find All 200 Parameters in Google
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