Search Engine Marketing & SEO Blog

The Community Participation Pyramid courtesy of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I decided to follow the line from one Beatles’ song: “With a little help of my friends“. You might argue that the best SEO bloggers out there are not my friends, but reading them a few times a week for years sometimes via multiple channels makes feel as if they are.
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Twitter and nofollow is the topic of this week’s Twitter column: While even Google who has introduced, along with other search engines, the nofollow attribute to combat spam a few years ago does not propagate the use of it anymore, Twitter went nofollow big time just recently. What does this mean?

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Busy Bee Colony by No Minds Vision

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

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

Here you’ll find out how to disable Google Buzz but also how to work with it in order to reach your business objectives.
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Having attended SES London yesterday, there were lots of great tips and facts from the sessions as always. This time rather than relying on my own notes, the coverage on Twitter has been fantastic so I thought I’d try something different to show the best tweets from day one.

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