Here’s some advice from Twitter 101 – A Special Guide on using Twitter to build your business:
- Use Twitter as a place to build relationships, rather than just broadcasting information about your company
- Include names or @usernames of people twittering, as well as additional company contact information
- Scan Twitter regularly for comments about your company and be prepared to respond with answers to concerns, offers of customer service, or thanks
- Provide value with your tweets. Twitter offers the following suggestions:
- Offer Twitter exclusive coupons or deals
- Take people behind the scenes of your company
- Post pictures from your offices, stores, warehouses, etc.
- Share sneak peeks of projects or events in development
As Twitter notes, real-time communication is becoming ground-breaking for both users and businesses.
Google has recently provided the following helpful updates to the Search Queries component of Webmaster Tools:
- Average position column now appears on the main Search Queries page. This provides a quick view of where site is showing in search results for specific queries.
- Displaying total for Impressions and Clicks also appears on the main page. This provides a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries. This includes the long tail of queries not displayed in the Search Queries table.
- Added an Average position column to the Search Queries download.
- “Starred” tab added to Search queries: Next to each query on the Search Queries page there is now a clickable star icon. Click this star icon for any queries of interest. All of starred queries will be consolidated under the Starred tab allowing for quick reference and availability.
April 29, 2010 – 10:55 PM
Earlier this month, the Google Local Business Center became Google Places. This change is designed to connect Place Pages with the tool Google provides for business owners managing their Google presence.
New features include:
- Service areas: show geographic areas served by your business if you travel to serve customers
- Business photo shoots: in certain cities, businesses can request a free interior photo shoot
- Customized QR codes: Download a QR code unique to your business from the Google Places dashboard. QR codes can be placed on marketing materials and scanned by some smartphones to take customers to the mobile version of the company’s Page Place
- Real-Time updates: for sale promotions, special events, coupons, etc.
Google says that one out of five Google searches are related to location, so taking advantage of this service is an important piece of local SEO.
[Background information provided by The Official Google Blog]
Large sections of content within a domain that are a close or exact match are considered duplicate content by Google. Although the occurrence is usually unintentional, this could have a negative impact on SEO.
A few examples of non-malicious duplicate content identified by Google are:
- Discussion forums that generate stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices in addition to regular content
- Multiple distinct URLs pointing to the same product in a store
- “Printer-only” iterations of pages
Here are a few suggestions from Google to address issues with duplicate content:
- Use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders.
- Keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.site.com/page/ and http://www.site.com/page and http://www.site.com/page/index.htm.
- Use top-level domains to help Google serve the most appropriate version of a document (http://www.site.de instead of http://www.site.com/de or http://de.site.com).
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to indicate how you prefer your site to be indexed: (http://www.site.com or http://site.com).
- Minimize similar content: expand the content of each page if a two exist with extensive similarities, or consolidate the two into a single page.
February 26, 2010 – 11:35 PM
Google Webmaster Tools provides an extremely useful set of information under Top search queries (find it under “Your site on the web”). It provides a sanity check to ensure site content matches the searches that visitors are using to get to the site.
This tool has two statistical tables: Impressions and Clickthrough. Impressions lists the top Google searches where the site appeared combined with the site’s average ranking in those search results. Clickthrough lists the top Google searches where visitors clicked through to the site.
The following information is available in the two tables:
#: The ranking for the query
%: The percentage of the top 100 queries represented by the listed queries
Query: The keyword used
Position: The highest position any page from the site ranked for the query. Note that this data is dynamically averaged over the past week.
After comparing the two tables, consider the ways to make site content more compelling so users click through to the site in search engine results pages. This is where page title and meta description are critical, since this content will appear in search results.
Google also notes that this data may differ from Google Analytics since Webmaster Tools processes data to eliminate duplicates and visits from robots. Google Analytics will also only track traffic from users with JavaScript enabled in their browser.
January 30, 2010 – 9:11 PM
Google Webmaster Tools is currently providing a Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools. This feature delivers two pieces of information:
- Performance overview: how long it takes your site to load (measured in seconds), how this compares to other sites, and an assessment of this measurement’s accuracy based on the number of data points.
- Page Speed suggestions: suggestions on how to optimize pages from the site based on the Page Speed tool. Google not only provides these suggestions, but also an estimate of the potential improvement in file transfer size or speed if implemented.
A Page Speed browser add-on is also available here to evaluate page performance and provide solutions for improvement.
One thing to note: Google includes a disclaimer that Webmaster Tools Labs features may change, break, or disappear at any time. Hurry up and check it out.
December 28, 2009 – 9:55 AM
Here’s a few points to note as a follow up to the Need More Power? post.
Word Exceptions
- Commonly used words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ are usually ignored, but there are exceptions [the hobbit]
- To avoid synonym replacement of words in a query, insert a ‘+’ before the word to disable this feature
- Google may omit a word from the query if other evidence indicates that the page is relevant
Watching Punctuation
- Terms containing punctuation with a specific meaning are not ignored: [ASP.NET]
- The dollar sign will change results, delivering price-related information: [iPod 60] vs. [iPod $60]
- The hyphen can be used to indicated a strong link between two words. Note that a space before the hyphen will change this indication to a negative sign and omit the attached term from the search. [video game] vs. [video-game]
- The underscore symbol can be used to connect two words [video_game]
[Background information provided by Google Web Search Help]
November 30, 2009 – 10:41 PM
Basic searching usually does the trick, but sometimes a little more power is helpful. Google offers several helpful examples highlighting the advanced features of Google Web Search:
- Phrase search: put double quotes around the search phrase. This tells Google to search for those words in that order, no changes.
- Search within a specific website: [ diamondbacks site:mlb.com ] will return pages about the diamondbacks only from mlb.com. Classes of sites can also be specified: [ mba site:.edu ].
- Exclude terms: attach a minus sign immediately before a word to avoid pages containing that word in the search results: [ arizona diamondbacks -snakes ]
- Fill in the blanks: use an asterisk to replace whole words when searching for unknown terms. [ Diamondbacks * world series winners ]
- Search exactly as is: use the plus sign immediately before a word (no spaces) to have Google match the word exactly as typed. Putting double quotes around a single word is another way to use this feature.
- OR operator: to specifically allow either one of multiple words, use the OR operator (or the pipe |) to separate the terms. [ Diamondbacks 2001 OR 2002 ]
Coming next time: exceptions to these rules.
[Background information provided by Google Web Search Help]
October 31, 2009 – 11:37 PM
Think about planning a trip. Take a map and mark out a path to a destination. A map will provide useful information about routes and connecting points. A map should also be accurate and provide a realistic expectation for the actual travel. After planning a trip and departing, what happens when a road is closed, or worse, a road doesn’t even exist? Routes have to change, plans have to change, and frustration occurs.
Before any SEO work can be fully consumed by search engines, a site has to be crawled by those engines. Web crawlers are automatic programs that browse the web automatically and methodically. They provide feedback to the search engine regarding the potential path (and pitfalls) a site visitor may see. If a crawler encounters any problems reaching pages on a site, there’s impact on SEO. A search engine can’t index a page that it is unable to reach.
Crawl errors can include pages not found, URLs not followed, URLs timed out, and HTTP errors. Any of these errors can prevent a web crawler from navigating the site properly. It is critical to constantly monitor crawl errors (Google Webmaster Tools provides this information for free) to ensure that any pages that should be crawled are accessible.
When a site is crawled successfully, the actual site matches the site map, much like the roads matching a roadmap. SEO efforts can be lost quickly if a search engine can’t get to the optimized content without encountering errors.
September 29, 2009 – 9:59 PM
What happens when potential customers call a business and ends up confused by what they hear on the other end? If they’re expecting a certain familiar greeting and end up hearing something different, customer’s experience and impression starts out on the wrong foot. Some may persist, others may call someone else. Consistency in a company’s identity is key, particularly for potential customers.
When a company creates a local business listing on the web, consistency continues to be a key factor. Humans can often overlook minor errors in spelling or addresses, but search engines may have a hard time if something isn’t an exact match. In order to build a consistent, strong online presence, it’s a good idea to keep a standard set of core company information. This includes the following list:
- Official company name
- Address (listed the same way it would appear on a physical letter)
- Phone number, including area code
- Website
- Contact email
- Company description
Consistency in local business listings will help build a prominent web presence. Keeping your information consistent reinforces your presence with the search engines and doesn’t diffuse your online optimization efforts.