Use Twitter For Business With The Right Strat

If we all look for the hungry fish doesn?t that make us sheep?

2010-11-15T10:08:00.001-08:00

Guest Post by Diane Corriette There is a constant struggle for some bloggers between stats and creativity. Online I teach what is recommended� – to find a group of people (known as a pool of hungry fish) find out what they want and give it to them. The only way to find out where that group of [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheFridayTrafficReport/~3/7bKpUpIBQU8/

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When is it time to give up trying to make it in the online marketing world?

2010-11-15T08:08:00.001-08:00

Image by Orange_Beard via Flickr by Diane Corriette I have spoken to, met, mentored and had skype conversations with people around the world ? many of them desperate to use the internet to generate an income, and so many of them unsuccessfully trying.� This week I wondered� ? when is it time to give up trying to [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheFridayTrafficReport/~3/6AmcHNAfrlU/

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54% of retailers to put m-coupon systems in place in next 12 months

2010-11-15T06:08:00.001-08:00

Retailers are wising up to the trend in mobile coupons, according to a recent report by IHL Group and RetailConnections. Many are set to implement systems that will allow them to delivery coupons direct to a consumer's mobile phone.

Source: http://www.bizreport.com/2010/11/54-of-retailers-to-put-m-coupon-systems-in-place-in-next-12.html

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(R)evolution: Scott Monty Steers Ford to Social Relevance

2010-11-15T04:08:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the (R)evolution, a new series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, marketing, and media. Today we journey to Las Vegas where we shot on location at the House of Blues Foundation Room during Blogworld Expo. My first guest in a three-part series is my good [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Pr20/~3/T_0L0uQLlg8/

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301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?

2010-11-15T02:08:00.001-08:00

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we've certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines -

When should I use a rel canonical tag over a 301?
Is there a way that the rel canonical tag can hurt me?
When should I not use the canonical tag?
What if I can't get developers to implement 301s?

I'm going to attempt to answer these questions here.

The 301 Redirect - When and How to Use it

A 301 redirect is designed to help users and search engines find pieces of content that have moved to a new URL. Adding a 301 redirect means that the content of the page has permanently moved somewhere else.

Source: http://www.ragepank.com/images/301-redirect.jpg

What it does for users

Users will probably never notice that the URL redirects to a new one unless they spot the change in URL in their browser. Even if they do spot it, as long as the content is still what they were originally looking for, they're unlikely to be affected. So in terms of keeping visitors happy, 301 redirects are fine as long as you are redirecting to a URL which doesn't confuse them.

What it does for the search engines

In theory, if a search engine finds a URL with a 301 redirect on it, they will follow the redirect to the new URL then de-index the old URL. They should also pass across any existing link juice to the new URL, although they probably will not pass 100% of the link juice or the anchor text. Google have said that a 301 can pass anchor text, but they don't guarantee it.

In theory a search engine should also remove the old page from their index so that their users can't find them. This can take a little bit of time but usually can take no longer than a few weeks. I've seen pages removed within a few days on some clients but its never set in stone.

Where is can go wrong

Not knowing your 301s from your 302s

The classic one which I've seen more than once, is developers getting mixed up and using a 302 redirect instead. The difference with this is that a 302 is meant to be used when content is temporalily moved somewhere else. So the link juice and anchor text is unlikely to be passed across. I highlighted an example of this in a previous blog post, if you go to http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ you'll see a 302 is used. I first spotted this several months ago and it still hasn't been fixed and I'd assume that this isn't a genuine temporary redirect.

Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL

Another common mistake I see involves site migration. An example being if your website has 500 pages which are moving somewhere else. You should really put 500 301 redirects on these pages which point to the most relevant page on the new site. However I've often see people redirect all of these 500 pages to a single URL, usually the homepage. Although the intention may not be manipulative, there have been cases of people doing this to try and consolidate all the link juice from loads of pages into one page, to make that page stronger. This can sometimes put up a flag to Google who may come and take a closer look at whats going on.

Matt Cutts talks about this in this Webmaster Tools video:

When you should use a 301

Moving Sites

You should certainly use 301 redirects if you are moving your website to a new location or changing your URLs to a new structure. In this situation, you don't want users or search engines to see the old site, especially if the move is happening because of a new design or structural changes. Google give clear guidelines here on this and advise the use of 301s in this situation.

Expired Content

You should also use a 301 if you have expired content on your website such as old terms and conditions, old products or news items which are no longer relevant and of no use to your users. There are a few things to bear in mind though when removing old content from your website -

Check your analytics to see if the content gets any search traffic, if it does, do you mind potentially losing that traffic if you remove the content?
Is there another page on the site which has very similar content that you could send the user to? If so, use a 301 and point it to the similar page so that you stand a chance of retaining the traffic you already get
Is the content likely to become useful in the future? For example if you have an ecommerce site and want to remove a product that you no longer sell, is there a chance of it coming back at any point?

Multiple Versions of the Homepage

This is another common mistake. Potentially a homepage URL could be access through the following means, depending on how it has been built -

http://seomoz.org
http://www.seomoz.org/home.html
http://www.seomoz.org/index.html

If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.seomoz.org.

Quick caveat - the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the homepage served a unique purpose, such as being shown to users who are logged in or have cookies dropped. In this case, you'd be better to use rel=canonical instead of a 301.

The Rel=Canonical Tag - When and How to Use it

This is a relatively new tool for SEOs to use, it was first announced back in February 2009. Wow was it really that long ago?!

As I mentioned above, we get a lot of Q&A around the canonical tag and I can see why. We've had some horror stories of people putting the canonical tag on all their pages pointing to their homepage (like Dr Pete did) and Google aggressively took notice of it and de-indexed most of the site. This is surprising as Google say that they may take notice of the tag but do not promise. However experience has shown that they take notice of it most of the time - sometimes despite pages not being duplicates which was the whole point of the tag!

When to use Rel=Canonical

Where 301s may not be possible

There are unfortunate situations where the implementation of 301 redirects can be very tricky, perhaps the developers of the site don't know how to do it (I've seen this), perhaps they just don't like you, perhaps the CMS doesn't let you do it. Either way, this situation does happen. Technically, a rel=canonical tag is a bit easier to implement as it doesn't involve doing anything server side. Its just a case of editing the <head> tag on a page.

Rand illustrated this quite well in this diagram from his very first post on rel=canonical:

Multiple Ways of Navigating to a Page

This is a common problem on large ecommerce websites. Some categories and sub-categories can be combined in the URL, for example you could have -

www.phoneshop.com/smartphone/3G
www.phoneshop.com/3G/smartphone

In theory, both of these pages could return the same set of results and therefore a duplicate page would be seen. A 301 wouldn't be appropriate as you'd want to keep the URL in the same format as what someone has navigated. Therefore a rel=canonical would work fine in this situation.

Again, if this situation can be avoided in the first place, then thats the ideal solution as opposed to using the canonical tag.

When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly

By this I mean URLs which tend to be database driven and can vary depending on how the user navigates through the site. The classic example is session IDs which are different every time for every user, so it isn't practical to add a 301 to each of these. Another example could be if you add tracking code to the end of URLs to measure paths to certain URLs or clicks on certain links, such as:

www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

When Not to Use Rel=Canonical

On New Websites

I've seen a few instances where rel=canonical is being used on brand new websites - this is NOT what the tag was designed for. If you are in the fortunate position of helping out with the structure of a new website, take the chance to make sure you avoid situations where you could get duplicate content. Ensure that they don't happen right from the start. Therefore there should be no need for the rel=canonical tag.

On Pagination - maybe! At least use with caution

This is a tough one and unless you really know what you're doing, I'd avoid using rel=canonical on pagination pages. To me, these are not strictly duplicate pages and you could potentially stop products deeper within the site from being found by Google. This seems to have been confirmed by John Mu in this Google Webmaster thread. He gives some interesting alternatives such as using javascript based navigation for users and loading all products onto one page.

Having said that, John Mu has made a point of not ruling it out totally. He just advises caution, which should be the case for any implementation of the canonical tag really - except if you're Dr Pete!

Across your entire site to one page

Just a quick note on this one as this is one way which using the rel=canonical tag can hurt you. As I've mentioned above, Dr Pete did this as an experiment and killed most of his site. He set the rel=canonical tag across his entire site pointing back to his homepage and Google de-indexed a large chunk of his website as a result. The following snapshot from Google Analytics pretty much sums up the effect:

Conclusion

In summary, you should use caution when using 301s or the canonical tag. These type of changes have the potential to go wrong if you don't do them right and can hurt your website. If you're not 100% confident, do some testing on a small set of URLs first and see what happens. If everything looks ok, roll out the changes slowly across the rest of the site.

In terms of choosing the best method, its best to bear in mind what you want for the users and what you want them to still see. Then think about the search engines and what content you want them to index and pass authority and link juice to.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/2_oH4SJvm3k/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

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How to Write Better Emails

2010-11-15T00:08:00.001-08:00

I hate spending time on email. But for those of us who do most of our work online, we can't escape it. When was the last time you took a hard look at the emails you send to other people? Are your emails helping or hindering?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webworkerdaily/~3/sACYYiwYqKY/

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Study: Look for more consumers to access health info via app

2010-11-14T22:08:00.001-08:00

Don't expect consumers to remain on the Internet when it comes to health information. According to a recent study, mobile applications for health-related information will see a large growth period very soon. Why? Because consumers don't just want health information at work or at home; they want that information available on an as-needed basis.

Source: http://www.bizreport.com/2010/11/study-look-for-more-consumers-to-access-health-info-via-app.html

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Shall We Play a Game? Interactive Adventures in Social Marketing

2010-11-14T20:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/lM1luvBy2eI/shall-we-play-game-interactive.html

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Why Isn?t Netflix on Android? Not Secure Enough To Suit Hollywood

2010-11-14T18:08:00.001-08:00

The Netflix streaming app has been available on iPhones and iPads for months, and this month was released for Windows 7. Why isn’t it available for Android? Netflix says it’s because they can’t get a secure enough DRM system across Android devices to mollify the studios.
“The same security issues that have led to piracy [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/why-isnt-netflix-on-android-not-secure-enough-to-suit-hollywood/

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TechSmith?s Screen Capturing Tool Snagit Comes to the Mac

2010-11-14T16:08:00.001-08:00

After 19 years of being Windows-only, Techsmith's popular screen capturing tool Snagit has today finally been released for the Mac. It promises to be an intuitive app with more powerful features than those available from OS X's built-in tools, so I took it for a spin.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webworkerdaily/~3/s4Sn_FOXN8s/

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Posterscope and LocaModa Advise Brands to Connect with Consumers Online and Offlinescreenmediadaily.com

2010-11-14T14:08:00.001-08:00

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Taking Over Someone Else?s Project: How to Handle the Transition

2010-11-14T12:08:00.001-08:00

I sometimes find myself taking over other people?s projects, like rewriting existing website content or finishing website designs. But taking on another person?s project can be challenging, especially if they are no longer around. So how can you make the transition as smooth as possible?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webworkerdaily/~3/U-cNmk_nAK4/

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Taking Over Someone Else?s Project: How to Handle the Transition

2010-11-14T10:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webworkerdaily/~3/U-cNmk_nAK4/

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Using Canonical Tag to Get More Than One Anchor Text Value

2010-11-14T08:08:00.001-08:00

Posted by fabioricotta

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hi SEOmoz folks,

Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.

The idea is simple: we chose 3 random keywords, created an internal page, created 3 links to different URLs that have a canonical tag to the main page. You can see this idea illustrated bellow:

So, after choosing the 3 keywords we submitted each one to check if Google has any occurrences of them:

Then we bought a new domain, that has no backlinks and as you can see bellow, Google shows us that this website isn't in the index:

Creating the Index Page

To start the experiment my coworker downloaded a random template from the Internet with some random content inside, changing only the page title, meta description and H1 tag focusing all them into the main website keyword “jogos online de corrida” (online race games in English). The major change he made into the template was to add a conditional check with PHP to insert the canonical tag if the URL requested had any parameter:

<? if (isset($_GET[keyword]))

{ ?>

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br" />

<? } ?>

For those who know something about PHP language, this code checks if the variable $_GET exists. If this check returns true the code insert the canonical tag line into the HTML.

It’s important to say that we do not mention any of those 3 keywords in the Index Page. So, this page can’t rank for having a keyword mention… instead Google needs to check it’s backlinks.

Internal Page

The next step was to create the internal page. We created it with 3 links in 3 different page positions: one in the header, another one in the content area and the last one in the footer area with the following anchor text: “nanuoretfcvds ksabara1″, “esjstisfdfkf aasjdkwer” e “gisrterssia fdswreasfs”. Each link had different targets:

http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key1
http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key2
http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key3

It’s important to say that we used the meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” /> into this internal page, so this page would not rank for those 3 keywords.

Indexing the Content

In order to have the pages indexed by Google my coworker created a Sitemap.XML with the 2 pages (home and internal) and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. It is important to say that we did not share this page in any webpage and did not submit in any bookmarking service.

After 2 weeks, our website was showing the 2 pages when we used the operator “site:”. After one more week Google was showing the 2 pages and the link to their cache.

After this “waiting time” we searched in Google on the 3 keywords that we created and noticed that the main page was appearing for ALL of them as you can see bellow:

So, with this small experiment we noticed that Google was giving to a page 3 anchor text values if we use the canonical tag as a funnel.

Conclusions and Applications

With this small experiment we have a hint on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag and now we can try to create some new experiments (eg.: use a parameter in the logo link to your main page, and then receive the anchor text of the second link – because we know that only the first anchor text counts).

We know that this is a single experiment and we need to see if this works in a real website, because we know that Google understands the page segments and this maybe does not work as we presented in this article. We still need to try and check this.

I can’t end this article until saying congratulations to my coworker Leandro that provided me a huge amount of knowledge with this experiment – thank you.

Hope you liked this article!

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/4dsMHK2NAG0/using-canonical-tag-to-get-more-than-one-anchor-text-value-11283

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The rise of Location Based SNS in Chinasinotechblog.com.cn

2010-11-14T06:08:00.001-08:00

Source:

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The Path to Health Marketing Collaboration

2010-11-14T04:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/1C2CtavvB3c/path-to-health-marketing-collaboration.html

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Guest Post: Pretty Please?Convincing Your Boss to Take the Plunge into Social Media

2010-11-14T02:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/SRK7Xcl8r-w/guest-post-pretty-pleaseconvincing-your.html

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The Dawn of the Social Consumer

2010-11-14T00:08:00.001-08:00

Tweet…ReTweet Like Share Check-in Group buy QR code scan Augmented reality RFID What may sound like buzz words or mere hype, is actually the beginning of the end of business as usual. Welcome to the rise of the social consumer and a new era of social commerce. Look at the picture above and think about [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Pr20/~3/9n5qER-4ox0/

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When is it time to give up trying to make it in the online marketing world?

2010-11-13T22:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheFridayTrafficReport/~3/6AmcHNAfrlU/

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Gmail, Meet Fmail

2010-11-13T20:08:00.001-08:00

It’s a testament to the enduring power of e-mail that the company that got 500 million people to communicate on its own private network might now be eager to give them a tool to break out of the walled garden and contact the outside world.
Techcrunch speculates that Facebook will announce its own webmail client, dubbed [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/gmail-meet-fmail/

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SEOmoz PubCon Happy Hour 2010

2010-11-13T18:08:00.001-08:00

Posted by jennita

The SEOmoz PubCon Happy Hour is tonight! All the details you need are below:

Happy Hour Details

When: Wednesday, November 10th, 6:00 - 7:30pm

Where: Wynn Hotel in the Alsace 2 room

Directions: The Alsace 2 room is right across from Wing Lei restaurant and next to the Alex restaurant in the Wynn Hotel and Casino. The room can be reached from the upper right corner of the Wynn Casino. From the Casino, walk toward the Red 8 restaurant and continue on past the High Limit Slots, Tower Suites Entrance and Registration toward and past the Wing Lei restaurant. The room will be on your left, Alsace 2.

Who: All PubCon attendees!

Why: We'll have some cool giveaways [including 3 Kindles!] and free drinks of course. It's a party for goodness sake, why wouldn't you come?!

Still not convinced? Check out some of the pictures from last years party (you can see them all here).

Kristy Bolsinger, Kate Morris and Matt Cutts

Chris Winfield, Shirley Tan, Brent Csutoras, Dana Lookadoo, Tim Ash

So be sure to head on over to the Wynn right after Matt Cutt's Super Session on Wednesday evening. We'll be tweeting reminders and any updates. We look forward to seeing everyone there!

<3 - The mozzers

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cyWtTNlv4gg/pubcon-party-2010

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The Tip Jar - 5/10/09

2010-11-13T16:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/g_yMfZ4nceM/tip-jar-51009.html

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Come Dialogue on New Media Today!

2010-11-13T14:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/Z7irfVdCqJ8/come-dialogue-on-new-media-today.html

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Facebook Groups Give Rise to Social Nicheworking

2010-11-13T12:08:00.001-08:00

Facebook announced a new platform for Facebook Groups recently. Rather than jump into the fray to share my immediate reactions, I opted to instead allow the news and its promise settle. Like many, my initial reaction was that of disappointment. After all, I was almost immediately bombarded with emails notifying me that I was added [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Pr20/~3/A2gCbCIZX34/

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I Get Around

2010-11-13T10:08:00.001-08:00

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/social-marketing/WazZ/~3/-WgmExQynvY/i-get-around.html

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Ganttic: Drag-and-Drop Collaborative Scheduling

2010-11-13T08:08:00.001-08:00

If you like the idea of online scheduling tool Tom's Planner but find that's it's a bit basic for your needs, you might like to check out Ganttic. It's collaborative, has a similar Flash-based drag-and-drop interface and more robust project management features.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webworkerdaily/~3/0p1NUDrhMHU/

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Get More Twitter Followers With Some Forward Planning

2010-11-13T07:44:00.001-08:00

You can make money on Twitter using the right approach, but do not hold your breath for serious income, Twitter is incredibly helpful to suppliment your overall IM strategy, and has great utility in a supportive role.

It's a little recognized fact that Twitter can help you boost your PR. Some people have excellent PR and this can be transfered to other users by them following you and interacting with you. Then you can use a newly charged Twitter account with improved PR to assist your money pages.

A fantastic deal of the heavy lifting in Twitter is no longer so heavy at all, Tweet Adder for example will let you auto-follow with lots of various settings, auto-retweet, auto-unfollow, auto-dm, in fact, in the event you choose, you can just turn the program on, and that would literally be all that you have to do to progress your account, once you have set tweet keywords to automatically follow.

But you should use the saved time to interact with the other Twitter users and build your reputation, while your account builds on auto-pilot. The content of the tweets will draw more people to you. Bear in mind to take an SEO approach for your tweets, use keywords that you think other users or folks searching from search engines would type in, many can discover you this way!

In the end, it all comes down to having the appearance of knowledgeability and trustworthiness, if you actually possess they traits, then all the better! Any sales that you make via Twitter are a whole lot more likely to come from folks that you have been in dialogue with, best of all, if you initially discussed a issue with them, and then, only after sending a couple of tweets, make your sales pitch, as sales spam is usually so easy to spot and so offputting.