Be Ranked

OK – you’ve built a web site and according to popular SEO theory it’s time to go out there and get some links, because link popularity is something Google says is important for a good ranking. So, you begin contacting other webmasters and offering to exchange links.

Not only are you careful to ensure the sites are relevant, or in a complimentary market to yours, you’ve made sure the links you are getting are from pages with good PageRank or “PR”, because all your best SEO buddies have told you that good PR is extremely important.

After several months of tedious work you can see your web site has finally gained some Google respect, a PR of 2. You are proud, a bit excited and continue your work of exchanging links with as many webmasters as you can find. Some have suggested special three way links or even four way links as though there were some special advantage to these. Not quite sure whether that is so important or not you go ahead and accept the links because the PR of the page being offered looks good and the incoming links are from relevant sites so, hey! What’s the harm?

After another few months your Google toolbar indicates your homepage PR has gone up to 3 but you begin to notice what most web site owners eventually discover: your traffic hasn’t really gone up that much. Sure it’s gone up a tiny bit – but a careful review of the web logs shows 70% of your traffic is search engine robots visiting your site everyday as a direct result of all the links you placed. The actual number of humans visiting your site is still abysmally low.

This same story is played out over and over again throughout the Internet world because link exchange is not an effective means of building traffic, and toolbar PR is not an indication of how much traffic you are getting – only an indication of how much link popularity you are gaining. Let me say that another way: PR is no indication of whether any of your links are bringing you traffic.

I’ll ask you a question: all things being equal, would you rather have a PR5 home page and 20 visitors per day, or a PR2 home page and 200 visitors per day? The answer is obvious isn’t it?

Now let’s look at a different scenario.

Let’s pretend your name is Dr. Richard Smartypants and you happen to know more about arterial plaque buildup than any other person on the planet. You’ve just written an article about a new advanced treatment that can cut arterial plaque buildup by 50%. You publish this article on your web site and do the following:

• You send out several tweets (see www.twitter.com) to your followers letting them know the article has been posted
• Your blog software is set up to instantly ping all the blog update services to let them know you just posted a new blog
• You let a few of your closest colleagues know about the blog post and ask them to review it for you
• You post a quick note on your MySpace page about the new article
• You visit a few popular Medical Science Forums where you are a member and your Forum signature indicates you’ve just posted a new article in your Blog.

Within a short time a number of things happen. The social community begins to get wind of the new article and the viral engines of the Social world start moving in your favor. Twitterers start tweeting, stumblers start stumbling, diggers start digging, sphinners start sphinning and del.icio.us things start happening to your article (at this point I feel it is only proper that I offer a sincere apology for all the ridiculous puns just used).

The result of all these visits is a natural amount of links back to your site from various supportive readers. Visitors to other sites who spot the link will then visit your site and enjoy the article and hopefully the cycle continues. The cycle can even move into other non-web media if some readers happen to work for newspapers, radio shows and Television. Dr. Smartypants may even get requests for phone interviews and TV appearances and so will be able to promote the article and his web site even more heavily.

This is an example how a simple blog post can generate hundreds or even thousands of natural links if all the right pieces are in place. As redundant as it sounds, success is based on quality and using successful promotional tactics.  Quality research & writing must come first. Web content must be “linkworthy”. Each and every person with a blog or any type of web site has the capacity to write something phenomenal – it just takes time and the will to do it. Don’t write more frequently than is necessary. Wait until you have something truly important to say and you have researched it well. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see you on TV with Dr. Smartypants next month!

What ways have you found to promote your web site effectively using the web?

Google has created a series of videos to help the beginner learn about SEO. I think this is a great step in helping to eliminate the oodles of myths out there about how to get your site noticed and ranked by Google. We’ve posted the first video here and all 5 one a back page for you. Watch this one if you like and the you can watch the others by visiting this link.

In the meantime – here is the first Google video in the series, entitled:

Discoverability: How Google Can Find Your Site

All the google seo videos can be found at this link

A friend of mine VanGogh(1) (yup the famous one-eared artist and renowned web developer at Van SEO Design) turned me on to Twitter a while back and I blame him for the inordinate amount of time I have been spending twittering away my time late at night getting to know many new people in the ever expanding twitterverse.

After waaay too many hours reading through Tweets, I am convinced that a large number of Twitterers really have very little idea how to use Twitter to their benefit. Even many supposedly technically savvy Twitterers seem to think Twitter is nothing more than a bragging tool to let everyone know what they are currently doing so others can drool along behind them admiring their every tweet. That may work with a few celebrities, but who’s really interested when we’re “off to the club to have tea with @snooty and @snotty daahhling”? or “I just finished attending this hugely expensive seminar – cost me $12K but it was worth it baby”.

I’m sure the coffee tasted great at the high dollar cafe and the seminar must have been wonderful and filled with excellent information – but how did those particular tweets benefit anyone reading them? All they did were inform followers about…well, nothing…except their schedule and how much money they spent. Very important information if you need some good gossip info. I guess you could argue that the tweets were informative to those who cared…

People who have boring lives sometimes follow these types of Tweets because it’s a bit like reading a Tabloid. “WOW! I wonder what Britney Spears is up to today?” And to be fair, that may be just the types of followers they are looking for – what I like to call “tworshippers” or twabloid tweeters. It may be their intent to draw these exact type of followers and lead them straight to the next expensive seminar or shoe sale at Saks. Yes – even these types of Tweeters have their place, I guess.

The main point here is: unless you are seeking twabloid traffic you must be a GIVER not a BRAGGER. Just driveling along throwing out self-centered information that is of little or no value to your followers will get you dropped fast by most followers (and deservedly so IMHO). Most thinking Tweeters want information that falls into one of the following categories (and let’s make no mistake – these are the main reasons they are probably following you):

• useful or helpful to them
• fun or entertaining
• interesting, controversial or topical

One example of how to be a celebrity and do it right would be @jimmyfallon. I love following Jimmy because there is no way he could ever tweet back at all his 30,000+ followers (although it looks like he tries sometimes) but he offers them something more than just the “here I am today daahhling” gibberish. Recently when he went to the Superbowl he tweeted back a couple links to images before the event so everyone could see what he was experiencing. Not in an arrogant way but in a sharing way. He didn’t say “I’m at the Superbowl in famous persons box drinking champagne looking over the 50 Yard line”. None of that. He just sent back a few cool images as he went in so his Tweet followers could enjoy some of the experience with him. Nice guy. He often does similar things and I think @jimmyfallon “gets it” when it comes to Tweeting. He cares about his followers and wants his Tweetfriends to enjoy what he is doing with him.

So take a page from Jimmy’s note book and a few other successful Tweeters. CARE ABOUT YOUR FOLLOWERS! People know when you are putting on airs or talking down to them. Let them know what you know, share with your followers and they will give back. More importantly, they will keep following you and recommend you to others. That is what Twitter is all about!

So long fellow Tweeters. Tweet you later on Twitter!

A few other cool Tweeters you may get a kick out of following:

@JohnCleese (if you don’t know John Cleese you are not a Monty Python fan and are to be pitied)
@Chumworth (writes Jokes for David Letterman – Hilarious)
@StephenFry (over 160,000 followers? Learn from this guy)

(1) By the way, VanGogh (aka Steve) also has a great Small Business Forum should you decide you need a bit of advice about starting up or growing a small business to the next level.

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The World Wide Web is like a huge ocean filled with various currents, tides and hidden reefs where your company’s reputation sails along pushed by the winds of opinion. You can influence that opinion somewhat by blogs, articles, trade shows, your web site, radio shows, endorsements and countless other ways to get your message out to the public eye & ear, but how can you really know what effect you are having at a grass roots level?

Enter these 6 wonderful Social Search Tools. These little wonders will be the savior of small to medium sized business marketing professionals as they pick through search results, take the pulse of the marketplace and allow you to adjust your market focus to protect the reputation of yourself, your product, or your company.

All of these tools are effective at scouring the Social Networks for information – but not all display the results in the same way or take the same approach to how it should be managed. Some make a few decisions for you, while others just display raw information and let you decide what to keep and what to throw away.

Here is a basic review of each tool to help you decide which may be best for your reputation management needs.

Delver

One Line Description: Delver uses information you feed it to build a profile of who you are – then provides search results based on the collective “wisdom” of your network.

As of this writing Delver is still in it’s Alpha development stage but it’s an interesting little critter. Basically you “hand feed” Delver information about yourself from your blog URL, your Linkedin profile, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Hi5 etc. and it builds a profile of who you are, then returns relevant results based on “the collective wisdom of your social world”. Assuming your friends really do “know what’s best” this could be a very handy too for some who want to find relevant info quickly.

In the words of TechCrunch: “The objective behind Delver is to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs—an area that Google’s Marissa Mayer has indicated to be an essential part of Google’s future search offerings.”

As Delver continues to grow it promises to fill an interesting niche for those who like to stay within specific social niches. and feed heavily on user generated content.

WhosTalkin’

One Line Description: A very new straight-up Social Media search engine that sorts the results by type and displays the latest and greatest buzz at the top of the list.

WhosTalkin only recently came out of Beta and is one of my personal favorites. It doesn’t make decisions for me, it simply searches 60 of the Internet’s most popular social media gateways and finds what I want – I like that. Another thing I like is how it breaks the results into categories such as Blogs, News, Networks, Videos, Images and Forums. I can then browse through the posts to see what people are saying about me, my product or my client’s products in different areas of the Social world. A very handy tool for checking on reputation trends for small to medium sized businesses who may not be prepared to pay big time reputation management firms.

On the horizon it promises to allow subscribed members the luxury of “saved searches”, RSS feeds and (wait for it Bloggers) a Wordpress plugin! Yummm.

SocialMention

One Line Description: Another straight-up Social Media search engine with the advantage of displaying the latest and greatest buzz at the top of the list.

SocialMention pulls it’s results from numerous sources including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixes these as a single stream of information. The default sort is by most recent first but you can adjust the list to view by Source.

SocialMention assigns a Social Rank to the term you search and lists the actual sources it found them in. I searched the term “dog training” and according to this search engine it had a mention every 31 minutes in the social networks and a Social Rank of 93/100.

SamePoint

One Line Description: Almost the same as WhosTalkin it searches the Social Networks and displays the most recent buzz first, allowing you the option to sort by source.

Like the other Social SE’s, SamePoint pulls from all the major Social Media sources and categorizes them into it’s own categories: Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Networks, B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. All you have to do is click on one of the links across the top of the page to have it display it’s findings under each category.

At the base of the Home Page is a “Trends” link, which leads you to a list of the latest Social Search Trends. The page says “updated very often” but no specifics on how often that actually is. Still it gives you an idea what the hot topics are for the day or hour allowing you to keep on top of what is happening in the Social world.

SamePoint has a search plugin for your browser toolbar and you can follow their development progress on Twitter

Serph

One Line Description: A clean and simple social search engine that digs for the very latest buzz and lists it for your review.

What I like about Serph is you’re not digging through last weeks or last months listings; you are looking at what was listed today in the Social Networks. If what you want is the most current information, Serph seems to have it’s finger on the pulse. Not that the others aren’t up to date. But Pulse doesn’t seem to care about what happened yesterday so the search results return quickly and one might hope Serph’s focus would be on keeping their content very current so for those whose job requires up to the minute information, this may be the tool for you.

On the right side of the search results page you’ll see “RECOMMENDATIONS” and a little blurb “Your search lead us to these possible queries.” with clickable keywords complimentary to your search string. A helpful little extra. They also have a search plugin for Firefox.

I can see myself using Serph on a regular basis.

OneRiot

One Line Description: A social search engine that prioritizes information according to what is currently popular within their community.

If you want to know what’s popping hot on the web OneRiot has the temperature gauge to tell you. It tracks what people are talking about and returns search results based on what is hot in the Social Networks right this minute. In their own words, they find the “pulse” of the web and rate search results as emerging, surging or raging.

The home page has a running list of “Today’s Hot Topics”. OneRiot offers RSS feeds, has a toolbar plug-in and you can log in using Facebook

No doubt one of these tools has most if not all the things you may need to track you or your business’ reputation. Get out there and start influencing the winds of change.