This is an interesting feature to add, however the way it stands right now, there is not a lot of relevancy that is being put into calculating these new suggested people to follow.  Among the people twitter suggested that I follow are:

• Britney Spears
• Shaq
• Jet Blue
• ESPN
• NPR

I’d actually like to now what twitter is using to calculate these suggested people to follow, where did these recommendations come from?  Is this just a default list that everyone else sees as well?

How They Should Do It

Why not allow users to manipulate variables that they look for in people to follow.  For example, I want to follow someone who loves chess yet is also interested in social media and technology; can twitter recommend me such a person?  I’m sure they can.

How great would it be if you can have a little interface that let’s you customize search fields, you input the data you want and then twitter sends you a list of people who match your query.  I should be able to follow every other “jacob” out there if I wanted to, or every other person who is interested in chess, or bamboo carving (kidding).  Recommending someone just for the sake of a recommendation doesn’t do much good.  Let’s say that I was having a conversation with you about laptops and then all of a sudden I say “you know who I recommend for under water basket weaving?…”  That’s what the twitter recommendation engine feels like right now.

However, if I had the ability to customize my recommended followers I would probably be much more likely to follow and interact with them, don’t you think?

What do you think about twitter and they’re recommended follower feature, would you like to be able to customize this option to find people YOU are interested in?

Thanks for reading!

One thing I don’t hear a lot of social media consultants/experts/gurus or whatever talk about is starting the social media strategy process.  If you listen to Forrester you use the POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) method and if you listen to any other consultant they will all say you start with listening to the conversation before you engage.  Ok, that’s great.  I say start with your SEO and your analytics.  Let me explain.

If you are a large brand or company you are using an analytics solution such as google analytics (you are using one…right?) to track your traffic and understand your visitors.  Do you seeing where I’m going with this?  I think the first phase a social media strategy should be understanding what your users search for when they are looking for your product or brand.  For example if you are Microsoft and you are looking to create a social media strategy around Office, what are you going to do?  Sure you can “listen” and research around the web to see what people are saying about your brand, but the answer may be right in front of your nose.

Let’s briefly outline some of the things your analytics can show you and why these things are valuable:

• What keywords users are typing into search engines to find you, this can give you a good idea of how users see your company or your brand.  What keywords or phrases do they associate with you/your brand?

• What keywords users are NOT typing into search engines to find you.  If the company brands itself as one thing, but the users see the company as something else; well then you know you have an issue here.  Understanding this will help you create your communities.

• Where your traffic is coming from, is it through digg, twitter, etc?  This can give you a good idea of where your communities already exist (if you have them) or where you need to create them.  If I see a good portion of my traffic coming from twitter, then I probably already have an evangelist or a community that I can tap into.

• What part of the world are my users coming from?  This will help me understand where I need to focus my efforts of community building.  If I am a global brand trying to target Germany yet I see no traffic coming from there, then perhaps I want to step up my game, maybe hold a few offline events/speaking engagements, create a more German targeted site, etc.

• Top content categories.  If I have a page with several tabs (X, Y, Z) and I see that Y is the most popular tab, then perhaps I would want to build a community around “Y” or see if existing communities exist.  Knowing what your users love the most on your site is a great starting point for a social media campaign or strategy.

• Visitor segmentation by language.  This is simple yet powerful.  If I see that I have an English speaking site that is getting interest from a lot of foreign speaking countries, then I should create communities or microsites for my foreign speaking friends.

• Drilldown by network location.  I can actually see if most of my users are coming from charter, comcast, verizon, bellsouth, etc.  Understanding this may help in possible cross-branding communities or promotions through social media channels.

• Visitor loyalty lets me see how many times the same person has visited my site.  This can help me understand if I have possible fans or evangelists out there, of course this is crucial.  If I see that I have a few brand evangelists I would invite them to help me promote my content.

These are just a few of the things your analytics can show you.  Keep in mind that this all information you have access to right now at the click of a button.  Open your analytics and get to know your users and consumers.  I’m not knocking listening and I’m sure some of you may even group this into the listening phase but I have not heard about or read any posts that mention starting social media from your analytics or SEO.  The benefit of having a background in SEO and in social media is that you can understand how to sync and utilize the two together to build a powerful and effective strategy.  Every time I think about social media I inherently think of intertwining SEO.

Something as simple as understanding what keywords your visitors use to get to your site can help you understand the anchor text to use when/if you write guest posts, which in turn can help you rank higher in search engines for your target phrases, which in turn can help increase brand awareness and visibility and hopefully and eventually increase revenue.

Yes, there are a lot of variables that come into play such as whether or not a company is already using SEO.   The point of this post is to get you to realize and understand that you have a lot of the data you need to get started with a social media strategy right in front of you.  Your site analytics is a very powerful tool that will give you a lot of targeted information specifically about your users.

How are you using SEO and analytics information to mold and form your social media strategy?

Thanks for reading!

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If you are among the people who believe that SEO is going to die or fade away then I respectfully and lovingly say that you are out of your little mind and should be admitted for psychiatric care immediately.  However, I will say that a lot of SEOs out there will disappear, I’m talking about the SEOs who read SEO Book and SEOmoz and then report that information to clients.  I’m talking about the SEOs who believe thanks links are the end all be all SEO strategy.  Pretty much, I’m talking about the guys who really have no idea what SEO is to begin with.

First, a disclaimer, I run a team of technical SEOs and I believe that a lot of the SEO out there is garbage.  That, and I also strongly believe that my team of SEOs is by the far the best on the planet

SEO is about understanding how a search engine works and it’s about presenting the highest quality and most relevant content; both to search engines and to humans.  What I find irritating is that most SEOs work based off of observational data, free/public tools, and the “gospel” of other SEOs.  If this is the kind of SEO you do, and you are among the many who rely on OTHER people to craft and create your strategies, then yes, SEO will surely die for you.  SEOs die but SEO doesn’t.

I’ve always believed that in order to understand how SEO works you need data, you need analysis, and you need tools.  I started off as an independent SEO consultant a while ago and have worked for an interactive marketing agency.  I was constantly frustrated by the lack of data, there was no testing network, there was nothing I could lean on to answer the question of “why” when it came to SEO.  This is why I now run a team of Technical SEOs and this is why I think SEO is not going to die or fade away, it’s just going to change. those with the information, the data, and unique proprietary tools will win, everyone else will…well…you know.

Here is why I think SEO as as whole will not die or fade away (add your 2 cents in the comments!):

• more and more people flock to the internet for information, products, ideas.  That means more content which means more competition.  As your competition increase SEO will become more of a priority.

• SEO goes beyond title tags and links.  You need SEO to make sure that your content is clean and that search engines can easily crawl your site.  If you have a great site that search engines don’t see, then you don’t exist.

• SEO can take the shape of PR (ranking for a term), product development (understanding what your users are searching for and what they want), brand awareness (ranking for your company name and keyterms), reputation management (understanding how to push forward positive content above negative content), etc.

• spammers continue to hack and spam websites, part of a proper SEO campaign included preventative measures against hackers or spying competitors.

• as Lee Odden said in his reply to me, “if it can be searched on, it can be optimized.”  SEO goes beyond websites, it includes videos/images/press releases/etc.  anything that can be searched on can be improved with SEO.

• SEO is also more than just a plugin for wordpress and more than just a “website grader.”  SEO is about crafting and executing strategies and there is no way to automate that.

• I don’t know any other SEOs that do this but analyzing content for relevancy (as seen by search engines, we have built a tool to do this) is also something that is a must.  If you are trying to target a particular keyword or pharse then you want to make sure that search engines see that page as being relevant for your target phrase.  This is crucial for SEO and cannot be done without experts.

I think there is a huge difference between traditional SEO and technical SEO but that’s probably a topic for another post.

What do you think about SEO?  Is it going to Die/Fade away, or grow?

thanks for reading!

Have you heard of companies or individuals offering “turnkey” solutions/strategies for SEO or for social media?  Wait, let me back up, let’s start off with “what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the term “turnkey?”  I define turnkey as a one size fits all approach to getting things done.  I think of turnkey as a form or data field that companies can fill out with their information that then generates recommendations/results/etc.  An SEO turnkey solution would be something that says “insert keyterms here and we will create a title tag for you (get the idea?)”  A social media turnkey solution would be something that says “if you want more friends on twitter or facebook, install this.”  Of course, these are just a few examples that may or may not exist, but hopefully you understand where I am going with this.  You can also check out my post on “personalization not automation.”

When referring to SEO or social media I don’t believe in anything that is turnkey.  There is no such thing as as a one size fits all approach or an automated SEO or social media campaign.  We’re talking about strategies here, not clothing.  Here is my argument against using anything turkey for SEO or social media (and probably a lot of other things):

• your business is always going to have a different target audience, a different set of keywords, different conversation hubs, a different product, etc.

• if you use a turnkey solution and so do your competitors, then where is the advantage for you?

• a tool that works for company may not work for another company

• easy and cheap does not imply effective

• the relationships you try to build through SEO or social media may not make sense for everyone.  For example if you are an author or an online retailer you are probably going to go after very different relationships with very different people

• you can’t stand out or be unique from anything turnkey

• in order to succeed you need a customized strategy that matches YOUR goals and objectives

Basically I think that in order for any business to succeed in today’s environment a turnkey solution is actually more detrimental then beneficial.  With the economy struggling people are looking for “unique” and “original,” you can’t afford to go with anything turnkey.  A social media strategy for Adobe won’t look anything like a social media strategy for Coca-Cola and an SEO strategy for Chevron won’t look anything like an SEO strategy for Ford.  You can use the same basic ideas and general guidelines but if you actually want to see results you have to have your own way of getting things done.

I use twitter, linkedin, and facebook, but so does Barack Obama.  One of us uses social media to give advice, tips, strategies, promote content, and create conversation; the other uses social media as a medium for a calls to action, broadcast messages, status updates, rallying the troops (so to speak), etc.  There may be some similarities but overall the way I use social media and the way Barack Obama (or his team) use social media are very different, can you imagine both of us using the same turnkey solution or strategy?

What do you think about turnkey solutions for social media or SEO (or other)?  How would you define “turnkey?”

thanks for reading

This is part of a series of posts for various quick and easy SEO tips.  So far we have covered title tags and meta descriptions, today we are going to cover URL structure.  If you look at the top of your browser you will see a URL such as http://www.jmorganmarketing.com or http://www.google.com.  The URL is the particular address of the site you are visiting.  The URL structure of your site is very important for search engine visibility.  I’m not going to talk about sub-directories or folders (these are topics that my team of technical SEO consultants will covering on the blog once the new site is up and running), I am just going to look at the basic URL structure.  The goal behind this post is to show you the difference between a bad URL and a clean URL.  Again I am going to make my small disclaimer by saying that this whole site is going through a redesign so several of my SEO elements are not optimized (just in case you wanted to let me know).  Let’s get into it.

URL Structure

There is a lot to cover here and it can get pretty technical so I will try to keep it quick and easy as the title suggests.  The URL structure, along with your title tags and meta descriptions (and other SEO elements) should all work together to help you with search engine visibility and rankings.  Just like your title tags and meta descriptions your URLs are also all going to be unique.  Let’s take a few examples of bad URLs and good/clean ones.

The URL above is what I would classify as a bad URL, why?  Well, let’s think back to our title tags and meta descriptions, remember how we always try to use specific targeted keywords.  The main problem with this URL is all of those characters at the end, the “?ID=1435667….” search engines cannot interpert such characters for relevancy therefore it is advised to use relevant keywords in your URL that search engines can actually crawl and understand.  Let’s take a look at a good/clean URL to see what I mean.

This URL is taken from a page from the site of the SEO team that I run, notice the difference?  This URL is clean and targets specific keywords that are also being targeted on the page (title tag/description/etc.)  There are no weird characters in the URL and thus it is easily crawled and interpreted for relevancy.

Things to keep in mind when creating URLS

• Try to use keywords in URL, if the particular page is about “discount del laptops” then try to create a URL that looks like “http://www.jacobsstore.com/discount-dell-laptops” as opposed to one that looks like “http://www.jacobsstore.com/topic7/id=%732?”  See the difference?

• Try to use dashes instead of underscores in your URL structure.  Although Google claims that they have started treating dashes and underscores identically, our tests reveal that this is not the case in all situations.

• Try to keep your URLs short and descriptive.  You can use a few words but don’t try to fit a thesis into your URL.  Also, the shorter they are the easier they are to remember, there are a few other factors at play here, but these will be covered on the SEO blog (as mentioned above)

• Make sure the keywords in the URL are targeting the same words that your other SEO elements are targetting.  What I mean is that if your title tag, description, etc mention “discount dell laptops” but your URL has the keywords “christmas-cookies” then something isn’t right.

• stick with lowercase letters, URLs can take both so stick with the default lowercase

Having a poor URL structure can result in:

• internal competing pages

• lack of indexation by search engines (meaning your pages basically don’t exist)

• inability of users to remember the URL

• targeting/ranking of irrelevant keywords

There are a few other things but I’m keeping this very simple.  Again, the whole point of this post is to show you the difference between a poor URL and a good/clean one.  You should now be able to tell the difference between the two and have an idea of corrective measures you can take to clean up or create new URLs.

Does this make sense?  Do you have any questions?

Thanks for reading!