All posts by Tad Chef

SEO 2.0 living and working in Germany as a blog & SEO consultant. I'm blogging in English for SEO blogs around the world. My real name is Tadeusz Szewczyk but my friends who don't speak Polish - my mother tongue - call me Tad Chef or onreact.

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Recently there has been much talk about Klout. You could call it a swelling hype. Usually a new service goes all out to get noticed but Klout has been around for quite a while. Over time the service which attempts to identify and classify influencers on social media has gained considerable influence itself.

There are already lots of lists with Klout score optimisation techniques.

Some remind me of old school SEO. Indeed, some people propagate short cuts to boost your Klout influence artificially.

While many people rightfully contest the true importance of the Klout score, it’s still one of the best ways to measure influence on the Web without resorting to simplistic metrics such as followers counts. Klout also combines several profiles into one metric. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts among others, so that you get an overview of your overall authority or activity.

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When recently asked “what is your favorite SEO tool?” I could think of none other than Google Webmaster Tools. While many SEO experts will probably disagree and suggest to use some paid SEO tools suite, I’d like to explain my choice and present you with 44 Google Webmaster Tools resources.

Over the years Google has greatly improved the free Webmaster Tools. They’ve added lots of very useful new features and it’s now a must-use for regularly checking out your site.

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The Google+ honeymoon might be over but many people are still active on the site. As Google+ has some shortcomings, lacking features and usability flaws, there are now numerous tools to deal with these issues. I’ve compiled a list of the most promising ones.

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Initially Google+ was the darling of most media pundits. It was shiny, new and it grew like no other social network before. It was a typical infatuation with a new hype. Now that most Internet power users have already joined and been trying Google+ for a while the honeymoon seems to be over.

Several issues have marred the rise of the new Google social network.

Most of the issues are home grown. The dynamics of a top down social media launch, where the tech celebrities and social media mavens get the invitations first, can scare off the average user. However, these people are the backbone of Facebook’s success.


Other SEO blogs linking to us

 

While perusing the SEOptimise Google Analytics reports for last month, I noticed a few traffic spikes where I did not necessarily expect them. Upon taking a closer look, I discovered that many major traffic sources only show up as such on blogs, or rather blogs that are popular on social media.

New York*

On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.

While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.

Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.

Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.

So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.

With the start of Google+ your Google Profile is more important than ever. I’ve seen lots of Google Profiles that were broken in one or more ways recently when trying to find out who the people are who put me in their circles. Also

my name is by no means easy to remember, so I had to optimise my profile as well.

Let me tell you the most important ways to optimise your Google profile.

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Over the weekend I struggled to find out what Google+ actually is and how I can use it. I didn’t even bother to use advanced features where I have to install additional software to use. I don’t want Google Installer to mess with my new computer, and I was unable to delete it from my old one. I couldn’t even stop the process that automatically started with each boot. So I don’t trust Google software anymore.

I was just using Circles to organise my friends and followers from other social sites like Twitter. It seems Google suggests all your connections from other social networks you have connected to your Google Profile. Trying to sort several hundred people into circles is not an easy task, so I added a few dozen to three main circles called SEO, blogging and social media and did what I could to add the right people to the matching circles. It’s not that easy, as dragging and dropping them into circles is quite tedious.

Then I tried to use Google+ as it was intended, or at least discover the way it was intended to be used.

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Trunk.ly is the killer app nobody really talks about. It deserves the hype of Friendfeed or Quora, but barely anybody notices the huge impact it may have in future and it’s only rarely that someone explains how useful it already is. A few articles urge you to use it, but

Trunk.ly is indeed the solution for half a dozen Web-related problems almost everybody faces.

First and foremost, it get rids of all the fluff and chatter and lets you follow your favourite friends and influencers holistically on the Web. Trunk.ly simply collects all the links a person shares throughout the Web.  This might sound a bit like the aforementioned Friendfeed, but it lacks the annoying and time-wasting features of the former.

One of the few products Google doesn’t offer yet*

It seems Google wants to inundate us with new tools, products and services these days. Is this a way to divert attention away from all the bad news about antitrust lawsuits, the FTC and the like? I don’t know. In any case, there are lots of new tools to test.

Many of these will have a huge impact on search and the Web as a whole in future.

Others mights seem less noteworthy at first, but they underscore the long term Google strategy which focuses on social, mobile and HTML5 among others.

Either way, I assume that every business person has to know about these tools, as there are plenty of opportunities here and in some cases also pitfalls.

 

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