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Using Twitter for SEO

December 1 2010, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land posted the official announcement of Google and Bing that both search engines will incorporate social signals for the verification of ranks on their search results.

As everyone knows, social media networks are also used as a form of promotion for a web page. For instance, links that are tweeted on Twitter, latest posts in a blog, pictures on Flickr as well as your wall posts on Facebook, will definitely help a lot in generating interest for your own website. And in here, the more you use these tools, the better the chances of promoting your site.

Perhaps you are asking the reason why? Well, lets just say that major search engines such as Google, Bing and the others are now taking notes on the activities created on social networks. Those tweets you share, the pictures you uploaded, the latest content of your blog and your wall posts will eventually become a very important tool in the promotion of your web pages, as well as for attaining a rank in a search engine result page. This one is mainly due to the fact that Google and other search engines are now including posts made in these social media networks as part of their search results. With that, any site that is linked to these posts will also get their rankings boosted.

Maybe one can start on Twitter. Compared to constantly updating your blog, Twitter gives the freshest feeds (you can post a message every second if you can, just make sure you haven't posted it on that site yet), and the fact that it requires short tweets (posts/message) about 140 characters max or shorter, unlike a blog content which requires a thorough explanation.

Furthermore, when it comes to Twitter, the links that you tweeted is more likely to be determined by search engines the way they detect anchor texts. Meaning, the more tweets that are linked on your web page and the more people are re-tweeting your tweets, the more the chances of a boost will show on your rankings.

Nevertheless, Google and Bing added “we would be looking at the author's authority and the quality of tweets when evaluating links that appear in your posts”. In short, you can't just accept anyone who will follow you and you can't just follow whoever is available since authority means not the number of your followers or who you follow but their reputation.

Coping With The Google Panda Update

Recently, Google launched its new algorithm called the “Panda Update” which aims to clean up the web search results and replaced it with quality websites and wipe out those with low quality content. With that, many site administrators have scrambled to meet up with the requirements of the new update.

According to Google, the main purpose of the update is to help in promoting high quality content. The company's researchers have noted that much of the content that are ranking in the search results are actually coming from so called content farms, whose main purpose is to generate traffic to affiliated sites by creating content that is intended solely to influence the rankings. The Panda update aims to combat this by focusing more on the quality of the content rather than the number of links going in and out of it.

With the update in place, many are now expecting a radical change in the search results. Given below are some of the important points that you may consider to help in dealing with the effects of the changes.

KEEPING UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION

Along with the changes done in the Panda update, Google has also made several changes in its overall search results system. One of the most significant of these is the inclusion of of content coming from social networking sites. With that, you need to use these more in promoting your site.

ENGAGED IN SITE REVIEWS

One good way of improving the quality of your content is by writing more. Here, one useful means that you can learn is coming up with site reviews. These site reviews not only help in improving your site's traffic but will also be able to understand the finer points of writing high quality content.

IMPROVE LOCAL SEO

As localized searches become ever more popular, sites must take advantage of this in order to maintain their traffic. Here, having quality content is also essential in order to better attract specific traffic coming from the particular area being targeted.

QUALITY REIGNS OVER QUANTITY

With the recently launched algorithm, this proves that quality should be more prioritized over quantity. Regardless of how many article submissions you have made it still doesn't help. High Search Ranking Result apparently look for quality submissions to reputable websites. So this means that bulk and automated submission is now a big no-no with Search Engines Result.

A Quick Importance of Site map

One of the most important sections of a web site is the sitemap. For those not too familiar with the term, the sitemap is a collection of links that point to each and every page of the whole site. The sitemap can be either a simple list or a diagram showing the relation of the pages.

Properly designed websites should allow visitors to navigate the whole site without using the site map, incorporating a site map gives users other means of looking pages. Therefore, each page listed in a site map is typically linked to the page it represents. This allows visitors to jump quickly to any section of a website listed in the site map.

Why Use Site Map

Sitemaps has numerous advantages, not only easier navigation and enhance visibility by search engines. This section is also used to provide search engines with information about the alterations made on the site's overall structure. In addition, sitmaps serve as an entryway for search engines to start crawling your site.

Many design and usability guidelines recommended that a site map is essential for every web site. This is mainly due to the fact that both search engines and users will find it easier to navigate around the site using the site map.

Tips to Creating Sitemap

Since XML is the foundation for the sitemap, you can absolutely create and edit them via any text editor, but there are also special tools available. The following list gives a sample of presently available tools:

Google Sitemap Generator - A Python script that may be used to generate sitemap files.

GsiteCrawler - A Windows founded tool for generating sitemap files.

Node Map - A tool for the generation and also validation of sitemap XML files.

Gsitemap - A sitemap generation tool built with the .NET Framework.

phpSitemapNG - A free sitemaps generator written in PHP.

Be sure that your site map is linked into your homepage and not all the other sub pages, since linking it only to homepage will leave a plenty of rank page to spread quickly to all the pages on your website.

Dealing With Social Media Addiction

One can easily see how social media change the way people interact with others in just a few years since their inception. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to here and see people talking about their blogs, their Facebook profiles, or even comparing the ratings and viewership of their videos in Youtube. However, this one is actually the light side of the whole social media matter.

Just like any other craze that have hit the world in recent years, social media also has its flip side. As it is, being online is now a must for a lot of people, so much so that it becomes an addiction. And with the ease of accessing social media nowadays, a lot of people can easily get into it. Thus, it is important when to know that your craving for Twitter updates might be on the verge of becoming this one.

One of the first signs that you might want to check out for the time you spend in engaging on these. Take note that some people are actually spending a lot of time with social media manly for work related purposes, this does not mean that they are already on the way. On the other hand, if you yourself are spending a lot of your time (say, more than three hours a day to simply check out on your friends' status, then you definitely have something to watch out for.

Another tell tale sign that you are headed for a potential addiction with social media is the fact that you can't help but talk about it. While discussing your Farmville (a popular game in Facebook) harvest or your Youtube videos over coffee would be a good conversation topic, talking about them over and over again will give the impression that these are all the things that you do. And if this one isn't enough, there are some instances that you talk about your social media activities while you are actually doing them.

Sadly, with the prominence of social media in most people's lives these days, there is not really any way to get away from all of it. And with a lot of businesses and organizations seeing the benefits of using social media in getting their messages to the audience, you will soon be bombarded by even more of these. Thus, the only way out of this one is often to simply get everything out of your system. This, of course, won't be that easy, what with everything so much tied to you. However, a great deal of determination can actually help in dealing with this one.

Succeeding In Your Social Media Campaign

With a lot of people now getting into the social media phenomenon, many business have also taken notice and are now starting to use the new media form for their own purposes. However, as it turns out, using social media for business purposes is not as easy as using it to set up your own personal page. And as it is, of the hundreds or so companies that have embraced the craze on its early onset, only a few have actually survived and succeeded.

So how do you do your social media campaign in order for it to at least work in a good way? Well, for starters, you might want to begin with determining whether or not social media is the right way for you to go.

The thing is, a lot of companies who failed in their social media campaign ended up so simply because their business style is not fit for the area. As a clearer example, if most of your customers are mostly reliant on traditional means of information gathering (e.g. newspapers or TV), then you must consider first before suddenly shifting to social media.

With that, you also need to closely think about which social media networks you will be aiming for. Here, you don't really need to go after every new networking site that you see. In fact, this one can actually lead to a costly campaign. Instead, focus on the areas that will most likely give you a good return, such as the popular networking sites or the ones that are specifically for you industry.

Setting up the goals that you want to achieve in social media will also help in your campaign. And in here, you might want to move getting direct sells to a lower priority. The thing is, though you might want to do it, social media members are rather antagonistic when it comes to people who try to sell them products through Facebook or Twitter. Instead, you need to focus your campaign here on interacting and providing support to your customers on the network. This will also help you in being able to integrate more closely with the community.

And speaking of community, you must always be aware that you are a part of it once you get your campaign underway. Thus, you should abide with the rules set by the members. And in order for you to successfully be part of it, you also need to share a lot with y9ur fellow social network members. Giving tips and referring to other products is one good way of doing it.

Getting SEO To Work The Way You Want It

SEO is often considered as an important aspect of inline marketing, thus a great amount of time is often allotted to it in order to make sure that it works. However, with the length of time it takes to see good results on this one, some people can be quite frustrated. And a few can go on further and declare that search engine optimization is useless.

However, contrary from that belief, SEO is far from being useless. In fact, SEO is considered as one of the surest ways to deliver the needed traffic to your site. That is, if you know how to make it work for you. The thing is, in order for your SEO campaign to work out well, you must first need to plan it out carefully.

One of the first things that you need to familiarize yourself with is what SEO really can and can't do. Here, you need to keep in mind that, while optimization does play an important role in online marketing, it is not an all in one solution. With that in mind, you will then be able to the set the particular goals that you would want to achieve with your optimization plan.

Another thing that you need to be familiar with are the methods that are going to be used for your campaign. While it is true that you will probably be not the one who will do the actual optimization task and have a group do it for you, it would still be a good idea to be familiar with all the tasks to be done. This will help you in better understanding the work, as well letting you monitor the progress more closely.

You will also need to get involved in the whole optimization process. Again, even if you are not directly involved in the actual tasks, you still need to get yourself into the action, so as to speak. It is actually a common mistake made by some site owners who simply leave everything to the SEO specialists. As have been said earlier, SEO is not an all around solution, so don't expect your optimizers to do everything for you.

Lastly, keep in mind that SEO, like any other marketing strategy, is a long term one. Thus, you should always expect that results won't come in as soon as the next day. And with that, never constantly nag your specialists about results and instead work more closely with them in order to achieve your goals.

As you can see, SEO will work for you the way you want it if you know how how to go along with it.