Josh Laughtland of Jtree.net will be speaking at the open house at 4pm about Online Reputation Safeguarding.
Enjoy free food and drink while you mingle with Solution Pro Engineers, Northwest Computer Support Engineers, Apex Security Experts and Jtree SEO Services to learn about the latest in Search Marketing and IT security.
SolutionPro provides professional managed dedicated, colocation and virtual server hosting, IT, Data Center, and Disaster Recovery Services to small, medium and large businesses across the country.
Are you on Twitter? Do you run a blog or website? Do you tweet about it?
If you do, this tip will help tweak your tweets in an effort to increase the rank of your site or blog in the search engines based on targeted keywords and phrases. There’s no guarantee as to how much of an effect, if any, this will have. However, my personal tests have returned positive results.
To get the most mileage out of your link tweets utilize text relevant to the link destination. Then, make sure to syndicate your Twitter stream on other networks and platforms.
Related and Relevant
Keyphrase targeting tweets that contain links to your website or blog just makes sense. Twitter and Google are not only indexing tweets with links, but are also analyzing the words and phrases within the tweeted link and destination page on your site or blog.
How to SEO Your Tweets
Step 1. Make sure your targeted keywords/phrases are in the text of the tweet that contain the link. Ideally, you want the text to be relevant to the link.
Step 2. Link to a blog post or web page in a tweet.
Try to keep your URL short. If you need to shorten your URL, use Tweetburner or Bit.ly – which saves the original URL and text on the web and shares data with a number of other published resources.
You can authenticate bit.ly for use with other Twitter applications like Seesmic and TweetDeck. Hootsuite’s URL shortening service and social networking management platform is another viable option.
Step 3. Syndicate your Twitter feed/stream. This can be accomplished with a number of methods; Feedburner, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, RSS embedding, WordPress Plug-Ins, Widgets, social networking profiles and aggregation websites … for starters. Backlinks anyone? 🙂
Remember, Twitter attaches the “nofollow” attribute to the link on your Twitter profile and all tweeted links in your social stream.
Many syndicated links generally DO NOT have “nofollow” attribute tags, hence the elevated potential of increasing link juice to your website or blog.
Following the above 3 steps will increase the likelyhood of your Tweets acquiring backlinks by optimizing and syndicating your link tweets with keyphrases related to the promoted link.
You may or may not see immediate results. I’ve witnessed social backlinks juice immediately, then die-off after about a week only to resurface months later. FYI, there are a lot of variables in this scenario, and keep in mind that backlink accreditation can take time.
Instant coffee, pancakes and oatmeal never really hit the spot with me, unless I just happen to be backpacking or camping. So ,what about Google Instant? Is it good to go? Or, does it only perform well in a specific instance?
Google Instant
Basically, Google Instant represents searching while typing. Search engine result pages (SERP) are dynamically displayed WHILE keying-in search queries. Google even tries to help you complete the search query by predicting it (denoted in light gray text).
The prediction is essentially based on historical search volume, returning the most likely terms you are searching for.
Watch the video below to learn more about Google Instant.
What does this mean for SEOs, webmasters, website owners and bloggers?
According to Google; when checking analytics you might notice an increase in impressions. It only makes sense, displaying results while typing will do that. They also noted that now (post Google Instant) they are measuring impressions in 3 ways. Great, just what we needed – more metrics to keep tabs on. 🙂
Aaron Wall of SEOBook brought up some interesting points, and thinks that Google Instant consolidates search volume into smaller buckets of keywords. I tend to agree with this, as long as the smaller buckets are representative of relative results. Otherwise, the searcher will more than likely go for the long-tail term because it is actually the most relevant.
Graywolf’s description of Google Instant:
They think they know you so well that they can guess what you want without being told.
He goes on to mention that it really doesn’t solve any type of relevancy/understanding problem, but it could (on the PPC side of the equation) ensure high dollar value advertising will almost always show first.
Think about it, we all know that one keyword or a two-word keyphrase takes a lot more coin for clicks versus that nicely converting, low cost-per-click (CPC) three and four-word keyphrase.
What’s It Really Mean, Man?
For starters, it means you better have an SEO that pays attention. 😉 If ranking positions and traffic for you website or blog start to slide because of Google Instant, SEO strategy will need to be adjusted.
It seems, that the general consensus finds Google Instant annoying and somewhat distracting. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Google change the presentation of Google Instant before speculating on pulling the plug.
Key Google Instant Takeaways
Google Instant allows for increased Sponsored Results real estate by pushing organic results further down the page. This could lead to lower click-through-ratios (CTRs) on organic listings, which equates to less organic traffic for your website.
More exposure for PPC campaigns that are based-on highly competitive one and two-word keyphrases, in addition to expanded screen real estate – which could bump PPC CTRs up.
Potential to disrupt long tail targeting – given relevant short tail results are served. If more people click on shorter, predicted results – focusing on longer keyphrases would become less important.
Could cause some searchers to switch search engines unless visual presentation is improved or Google Instant is disabled.
Despite seeming somewhat annoying, I plan on continuing to use Google. The reason is simple – the results are the most relevant.
With all of the hoopla traversing the interwebs of late you’d think SEO is in danger of being replaced by social media marketing… well, think again. The two work best as a team and can provide tremendous benefit when leveraged correctly.
Search Engines are still vastly dominated by results from typical websites, not Twitter and Facebook status updates. When you search Google, the first page of results are referred to as ‘universal search’ results. This means that heavily weighted (optimized) content from websites, blogs and social networks may be included. The key term here is ‘heavily weighted’.
Search engines like Google employ this tactic because they are aggressively attempting to protect the relevancy of their search engine results. Irrelevant search results undermine the overall integrity of the search engine’s ability to find quality content. Honestly, are you really interested in an affiliate marketer’s tweets about a product they are promoting (for a commission), or would you prefer results that contain listings for actual products?
It is important to note that social content presented within Google universal search results does not usually rank high for a long period of time, like website content. To circumvent this, Google allows users to further refine their results by clicking on the left-column menu to show sortable results from various social sources. In a nutshell, potential visitors have to dig to find most social content, whereas traditional website content is easily accessible.
If a page 1, position 1 listing in Google for a given keyphrase receives approximately 40% of clicks originating from search – imagine how many less clicks content receives that requires ‘diggin’.
This doesn’t mean Social Media Optimization (SMO) isn’t important! It just means that certain principles of SEO need be applied to socially produced content.
Instant coffee, pancakes and oatmeal never really hit the spot with me, unless I just happen to be backpacking or camping. So ,what about Google Instant? Is it good to go? Or, does it only perform well in a specific instance?
