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.

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.