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SEO Update and Roundup
In this update we’ll cover a few recent changes that we hope will be useful to those with an interest in SEO and Social Media activity.
Of course Twitter is one of the biggest players in the social media space, alongside Facebook and the recently floated LinkedIn. Amongst the many updates put out by Twitter recently two seemed more significant to us.
Twitter has been using its own technology to selectively shorten URLs within tweets, providing shortened urls from its own t.co domain. The downside of this method is that users were unaware of what they were clicking as the target URL remained anonymous until the visitor arrived at the target site. That issue has now been solved using a new method which shortens all URLs within tweets to a 19 character string that still retains some of the original target URL’s characters – thus showing either the original URL (if it is short enough) or providing a good indication of where the link is going. Eg the URL http://www.letour.fr/us/homepage_courseTDF.html is displayed as letour.fr/us/homepage_co…
Links from tweets now all go through the t.co resolver so does it still represent the same value in terms of SEO? Well many, including us, suspect that Google is now perfectly able to track and value many different types of links and represent their authority fairly. So these new shortened twitter links, along with other shortened URLs, as wells as links with “nofollow” attributes all have a place.
Twitter recently reached an agreement to purchase the twitter client Tweetdeck, which allows users to manage multiple twitter accounts from a single interface. This has been typically used by companies, advertising agencies and marketing companies to simplify their activities and the fact that Twitter has bought the UK-developed Tweetdeck signifies its acceptance of that. Expect to see a number of new features being rolled out over time that may not be made available to other 3rd party consolidator tools.
Finally a useful tip for everyone faced with keeping track of multiple passwords – once an issue faced only by IT professionals but now a headache for almost everyone. Simply using the same password or writing your passwords down in a book at home is loaded with risk, so getting hold of some password management software is a great idea.
There are a number of free applications out there, but if it all goes wrong, it could be useful to turn to the help of a professionaly run outfit. There are several options but of the best we’ve found is 1Password provided by AgileBits (http://agilebits.com/products/1Password)
This application runs on both Windows and Mac plus there are versions for iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones.
The app makes recalling passwords very easy and can store a backup to the cloud using a Dropbox account.
Cost is a reasonable $39.99 for a single license but the licensing arrangements do seem a bit clunky given that you’ll need multiple licenses for a single individual to use it on different platforms.
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Social Media and SEO
Social media services, you know, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace LinkedIn etc are the favourites of some, yet dismissed in a breath by others. For anyone with half an interest in search engines though, whether you like or even use these social media services they are worthy of some attention. They’re interesting from a psychological point of view – why would certain individuals revel in their use, while others stay well away but their impact and usefulness in terms of search engine optimisation bears close examination.
Our approach to SEO at NetProspect is built on two foundations. Of course we do our research, evaluate the techniques used by others and monitor the way the search engines themselves discuss various aspects. Our second foundation is perhaps the most important though. Having worked in the search market for many years, our view of SEO various practices is also influenced by a healthy dose of first principles. By that we mean taking a long hard look at the core objectives of the search engine companies. Once you understand what these are then SEO practices quite obviously need to take into consideration how search engines themselves would make evaluations of developments like social media sites and which data they might employ.
Fortunately the value of Social Media becomes crystal clear when you adopt that type of evaluation. In the early days of search engines, the ranking of sites was determined primarily by the content of the site itself and the indicators provided to the search engines through meta tagging. This quickly became a less important factor as site spamming became prevalent and the search engines had to look elsewhere to make their evaluations.
Linking was their next port of call. By basically counting the number of links to a site, the search engines effectively had a ready-made voting system on which to base their rankings. But those interested in high search rankings then focused on getting as many links to their sites as possible. Again once the spammers devalued the technique being employed by the search engines and the raw link count became compromised. Next along came the importance of relevancy, where only “on-topic” links had any real value.
But the main disadvantage of this link counting system was that links were only made available, or originated, by those who had the ability to create and maintain a website – hardly a fair representation of the public at large. Enter social media! Finally here were systems that could contain links or references to other websites, yet be created or populated by the public at large.
Once again there is a danger that spamming will undermine the usefulness of ranking systems relying on this information, but over the past decade or so the search engines have become a whole lot cleverer in identifying spam. Rather than counting what might be called fraudulent links, and then next ignoring them, search engines will now actively penalise a site where possible for using such practices. Of course this approach in itself also needs to be carefully implemented, otherwise a site could be falsely penalised on the basis of a vindictive campaign originated by a competitor.
In these situations our second foundation comes into play again and we put ourselves in the shoes of someone like Google and look at how they might decide to work such considerations into their algorithm.
Terms such as trust, relevancy, frequency, ownership, peer endorsement, third party relationships all spring to mind.
No-one said it was easy, but undoubtedly social media holds some pretty strong cards when it comes to understanding the SEO game at the moment.
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Waving goodbye to Google Wave
Just a few months after a fanfare launch, Google’s Wave online collaboration and communication tool has been ditched. Perhaps it was too clever for its own good or maybe Google failed to explain beyond the hype, but users simply didn’t get it and take up was poor. Those who did sign up will still get access until the end of 2010. We expect Google to continue to try new ventures in attempts to diversify its reliance on Adwords revenue.
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The Importance of Social Media
There’s no doubt that social media activities are on the rise, with some marketing agencies dedicating special teams or even their whole company to offering social media services for their clients. Here at NetProspect we offer tried and tested strategies for optimised web marketing using the different social media platforms available.
It’s a developing area which every search engine marketing project should include as a core component.
NetProspect has already provided several of our clients with advice, guidance and implementation services to make best use of social media opportunities within their campaigns.
Whatever your view of twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, flickr, YouTube or any of the newer, emerging social media platforms, to ignore them during your web marketing planning would certainly be a missed opportunity.
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click fraud protection
Identifying click fraud begins with being aware of how different it can look depending on its source.
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