Thursday, April 15, 2010
More Real Time Search from Google
Twitter Traffic Volumes and Trends
When you search on Google there is an option to the left top that says +Show Options, if you click on that a sidebar opens with various options, one of which in the top set, is Updates. If you choose this option, once the feature is rolled out by Google in the next few days, you will see a screen like this;
The chart at the top shows the volume of traffic on Twitter regarding that subject. To see what the volume was a month ago, lets say, just press the arrow to move the period of time backwards. Trending of topics is easy to see with this facility.
Find New Twitter Friends
In Google Labs they have introduced Follow Finder for Twitter where you add the twitter name for someone, but do not put in the @ symbol as I did initially, and Google will show you suggestions as to who you might like to follow and on the right a list of Twitterers who have similar followers.
If like me you have found the search function in Twitter itself very frustrating you may well find this useful. If you want to follow any of the suggested contacts just click on the follow button and they will be added automatically to the list of people you follow on Twitter.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Please don’t let Buzz beat Twitter!! Twitter why are you not online?
Google are really pushing Buzz which by my experience is really difficult to deal with and no where as pretty to deal with - is that maybe discrimination against women cos it is well nerdy!!! - a useful legal point I think! Shouldn’t discriminate against women.
Anyway, Twitter is again down tonight! Not good enough!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Is the Web 99.9% Trivia?
Having watched the quite bizarre antics tonight on Celebrity Big Brother after Davina entered the house in disguise, I quite fancied reading a psychologist’s thoughts on it. However any Google search I did brought up results from 2005, 2007 but nothing current, so much for relevancy in search results! I tried a” latest” type Google search but found nothing and then when I searched using the search terms CBB or psychology in Twitter there were just loads of “I love davina” type messages. The only semi serious tweet I found was from Ben Shepherd the daytime TV presenter who said that last night’s/tonight’s CBB was very Animal Farm and sinister.
If anyone knows of a good online write up on this year’s CBB by a psychologist then do let me know.
Using Twitter, Forums etc In Internet Marketing
How Twitter etc can help you market your website.
It increases brand awareness and improves customer relations if customers find they can get an instant response to queries.
If you look at Google Analytics for your website a quick look at the traffic source will soon confirm to you how many visits come from Twitter, forums etc. Many people feel that forum and blog comments are of no use in promoting your website as most links are nofollow however a quick look at your analytics will soon show you that forums, Twitter and blog comments are all very valuable at driving appropriate traffic to your website with a low bounce rate. People who come to your website from forums, Twitter etc are visiting because they already know a little about you so they are much more likely to stay on your website and visit a number of pages and so you should have a low bounce rate for these types of visitors. Forum and blog comments may not provide you with an incoming link but used well they can drive good traffic to your website.
To use social media to promote your website spend a week promoting your business on Twitter and join an appropriate forum and post several times a day. Try and have a couple of days promoting your products, then a couple of days promoting, let’s say, your after sales care, then try future business developments. Watch your Analytics and monitor the following;
Traffic, has it increased? Which of your topics created the most traffic? Did any one topic cause a higher bounce rate than others? Which topic brought most unique visitors to your website?
Traffic Source - which of the websites brought you most visitors, Twitter etc or forum posts? Which other websites are picking up on your Twitters etc and driving traffic to your website? Which visitor sources are creating the lowest bounce rates?
Make sure that when you receive enquiries or make sales that you always ask how the person heard about you. This way you will know which activities produce the best conversions.
Set up analytics on your Digg, Twitter etc buttons on your website, that way you can trace just who is bookmarking you.
Loyalty and time spent on your website - which traffic source is sending visitors who spend a lot of time on your website and who return often?
One of the keys uses of social media is to increase brand awareness so check in Analytics what keywords are used in searches to find your website. I, for example have noticed that I get a lot of traffic from the search term “gill seo” which shows that my local business networking is obviously effective. When you see what keywords and phrases are bringing people to your website who hang around then focus on building those keywords and phrases into your content so that you become solidly associated with those phrases.
Check your Backlinks regularly in webmaster tools to see whether the particular page of your website that you have been promoting is being linked to and by whom. Then go to those pages that have linked to you and promote them yourself using Twitter, Digg etc.
Use social media to experiment with marketing ideas. It is fast and allows you to move quickly with any current trends. Always remember however to use analytics to see what works best for you.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Twitter Statistics - Does Twitter Have a Future?
Robert J. Moore has written an excellent report relating to statistics he has collected regarding use of Twitter. A summary of the statistics is;
There were 75 million Twitter accounts at the end of 2009.
The monthly rate of new user accounts is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (2-3 per second) - about 20% below July’s peak rate.
25% of accounts have no followers
About 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet.
About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times so only 20% are active Tweeters.
His conclusions are;
Twitter is still growing but the rate of new user signups has dropped from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts.
The percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months.
Twitter users who stay on the system after their first week as members show a high level of loyalty and keep Tweeting.
Those users who stay become more active over time.
With 75 million total accounts, and active users of around 20% still leaves around 15 million very active Tweeters.
Twitter recently backtracked and announced that it was not going to sell off this year as predicted but thatit was going to wait a couple of years and it is speculated that it will introduce advertising. I have commented previously on this and said that my feeling is that due to the fickle nature of the internet and its users they may be making the wrong decision. In 2 years time who know whether Twitter is still popular, something else could well have become the flavour of the month/year. No doubt Twitter is very important for social marketing but it does have some limitations which do need to be addressed.
If like me you manage a number of Twitter acounts for different businesses, it is extremely annoying to have to keep signing in and out of different accounts in order to tweet relevantly. Why do they not have a multiple account facility?
If ,for whatever reason, you wish to change your Twitter user name you can indeed do that without losing your tweets, followers etc but the main thing you CANNOT do is have your previous name redirected to your new name despite the fact that Twitter obviously knows both accounts are in fact the same. If you have built up pagerank for your old name then this is instantly lost as I found out! I have another post on Changing Twitter names.
Let’s hope they remedy these factors before another online system takes over their popularity and Twitter ends up worth tuppence ha’penny in 2 years time.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Sending Blog Posts to Twitter
If you have a blog then no doubt you want others to read what you write. The easiest way to do this is to use feedburner in your Google account. Once you have opened a Google account go to feedburner, you will find this in the more section of your Google account page. Add your blog feed to Feedburner then go to the Publicize tab and choose Socialize. Enter your Twitter account name and press Add a Twitter Account. You will then be taken through to the Twitter add applications page where you should click the Allow button. You will then be taken back to Feedburner where you can set up how the Twitters will appear. I would suggest that you do not choose the option to make hash tags automatically. For reasons as to why do read my blog post on Blogs, Twitter and Real-time Search .
Instead choose the option to add text and simply add one hash tag appropriate to your business.
Activate and there you go. If you then do a new blog post you should then see it appear in Twitter although it can take up to 30 mins to appear. If you have an add-on on your blog that shows the number of visits to your post you will soon see the figures rise just after the Twitter goes out.
If, as in my case, your blog is quite new then likely as not it will not have been indexed by Google, by tweeting out your posts you will increase the likelihood of other websites linking to your blog and therefore will speed up the search engine’s finding and indexing of your blog. All good SEO.
Friday, January 22, 2010
New Twitter Account for SEO4all
Hi
All of our posts are now feeding to a new Twitter account SEO_SEO4all and our link to Twitter, the bird at the top has been changed to take you through to this account. Our Twitter feed in the sidebar, however, still shows our S3_Web_Design Twitters so if you want to follow us on S3 Web Design just click on that link.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Beware Changing Twitter Usernames
Over the last few weeks the Google algorithm has been altered to bring blog, news and Twitter posts to the search results in less than 5 minutes consequently the page rank and indexing of your Twitter page is increasingly important.
If you have had your Twitter acount for some time and have the Google PageRank option in your toolbar in Internet Explorer you may have noticed that your Twitter home page gains a ranking over time. A fact that unfortunately, momentarily slipped my mind recently when deciding to change our Twitter user name to S3_Web_Design instead of the previous S3WebDesign.
I wanted to put in the underscore to see whether that helped our Twitter account appear higher in search engine results as obviously the underscores help identify the separate words in the name. It was only after I changed the name that I realised that our original page had a PR of 2/10 and that there was no way, as far as I can see, of implimenting a permanent 301 redirect to the new page automatically created by Twitter for the new name. Needless to say the new Twitter username created a NEW page showing no Google ranking at all. This urgently needs to be addressed by Twitter as there was certainly no warning on the page where you are offered the option to change your username that the PR would be lost .
If you know how to redirect an old Twitter page to a new one using a 301 permanent redirect do please let me know.
Blogs, Twitter and Real-time Search
Google is now including real-time search results from Twitter etc in its search results. Search Engine Land have quoted an interview with Amit Singhal of Google via Technology Review.
Singhal says;
“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,”
and
As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”
Therefore in simplistic terms, the more Twitter followers you have the higher you will rank in search engine results. But surely this must work in the same way as inbound links count for websites - surely the relevance and credibility of the followers must be taken into account?
There has been the suggestion that hash tags, eg #followfriday will be seen as an indicator of spam and therefore hash tags should be used with caution. This is particularly relevant if you use for example Feedburner to send your blog posts to Twitter. One of the options on Feedburner asks whether when on sending details of your blog posts to Twitter you want it to add hash tags. If you just say yes to this you will find that ANY keyword within the Tweet will be turned into a hash tag meaning there could be several just within one Tweet.
If you want to still use hash tags then you are better to not choose that option and to choose instead to append text to your tweet and here you could add a suitable hash tag which would be at the end of all of your tweets. This is particularly suitable for businesses. So, for example, for this blog I can attach the hash tag #seo to the end of all the blog posts that are sent via Feedburner to Twitter.
Google will not be showing absolutely every Tweet as it will take into account credibility as explained above but in addition it is felt that it will focus on current trending topics and so it is worth checking out Google Trends for the current buzz for today.
