I have 3,000 followers on twitter!!!!

IT DOES NOT MATTER

People using Twitter for marketing a product or service get this crazy idea in their head that the amount of people following them means something. This is contrary to the amout of people that click your ads on Google AdWords. It means nothing unless there people actually what you are tweeting about..

On one of my business accounts I use I have approximately 400 followers. about 5 minutes after I post a link to a new post or something cool i found, i get about 10-15 clicks. After digging deeper, about 50% look at other pages on my blog (bounce). These people clicking are REAL people.

Buying Followers:

NEVER EVER EVER buy followers. These are all automated accounts and will eventually be banned. I’m sure you have see the Tweet spam “OMG! I have 300 followers, click here so you can too!” These are all crap sites looking to make a quick buck.

Final Word:

When marketing a business or service, tweet like a person. Spam accounts don’t work and will be banned. I  have had great success with driving traffic to my website, and offering people tips on the service that I am marketing for.

Since the Microsoft-Yahoo search merger two weeks ago, journalists will not stop saying “GOOGLE IS DOOMED.” I think that these journalists need to do some more research and look into something more the ComScore results. Ask webmasters like myself who run numerous websites and generate income off them, where does your tarffic come from. I will say google, by 10x the amount Bing or Yahoo sends.

Once I see the stats start growing, then I think it will be a good time to start talking about Google loosing market share. People are going to be with Google for the long haul, Why you ask?

1. They trust Google
2. Why change? “If its not broken, why fix it?”
3. Google has Adsense, largest publisher advertising network. (Highest Paying)

I can practically point and choose what site I want ads on because of Google massive amount of AdSense users. Miscrosoft adCenter is small, and from what I hear, not good paying.

Tell me that I am favoring Google, well, I AM. I get my traffic from the and they provide great results with a minimal design. PERIOD.

Local business can drive a lot of business from a website. Targeting keywords is not hard, and you can beat nationwide companies using a few techniques.

I blog for a service related company currently. I post industry news and tips and trick on doing the job and informing more about they type of service we offer. I did this for months and months, gathering traffic, most from Google searches. Many times a local business will service a lot of towns/ cities. I realized that a lot of my blog post title names were placing well in Google, so I tried an experiment.

What if I mentioned a town I service, with what I do after it? ex.[Little Rock Carpet Cleaning]

I found that this works very well. Within a few hours I was in the top 4 results for that keyword. I don’t want to get greedy, so I am going to keep it at 1 max per day. Inside the post I will talk a little about the town, and stress that we do a lot of business in the town, and list our services.

I will keep you updated to if this brings traffic from Google and if I keep ranking well.

Watch this short clip from the owner of the popular website WebPagesThatSuck. His site is very successful.

I came across this cool tool a few days ago called TouchGraph. Simply type in your domain name or the keyword you are targeting, and let it do its magic. This tool uses the Google “related sites” query and displays a very cool chart. I tested a few out so far and find that they will display a lot of related sites and competitors. This means that you can go visit these sites, and ask the webmaster if you could write and article for them. Its easy to tell who runs the market for the keywords you input by the size of their circle.

As most of you know there are tons of Search Engine Optimizing and Internet Marketing companies claiming to guarantee first page Google rankings in days. We are going to tell you why this is something that you must watch out for.

Here is what Google has to say:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

–Google

SEO companies will give you the sales pitch, but it is a flawed guarantee. When the SEO comapny says that they will get you listed first on Google, ask them these questions (it will kind of stop the sales pitch and cut to the chase)

What keywords will you target for my website.

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

What’s your experience in my industry?

What’s your experience in my country/city?

What’s your experience developing international sites?

What are your most important SEO techniques?

How long have you been in business?

How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Most of this information is from Google. Don’t let a low-balling SEO company take your money. Do business with high-quality SEO companies that will work with you over the course of a few months to develop and PROVE better rankings to your site.

Millions are using Twitter, are you? Dell Computers publicly announced they have generated millions of dollars from this social network, funny thing is, it’s fairly simple. You just need a few things

1. A Twitter Account
2. TweetDeck
3. Time

Ensure your twitter username is short, and related to what you are trying to promote. Now you must download TweetDeck, a Twitter API client.

TweetDeck is great because you can have tons of columns separating topics that people are talking about. This is typically what I have set up:

1. Mentions
2. 4-5 Search Columns
3. Local People
4. Industry People

Simply use the toolbar located on the top left of TweetDeck to create new columns.

To finding local people, use Twitter’s advanced search on their website. You can search within a certain radius of a city or town, and then just follow everyone.

Create the search columns with keywords that people would use that could benefit you. Let’s say you sell shoes on your website, I would have search columns with the following keywords “new shoes” and “new sneakers” I would use the other columns for keywords that relate to new shoes that are out on the market.

When you monitor these keywords keep an eye out for competitors, and follow them. Place all your competitors in a column to see what they are tweeting about.

Now the next step is to actually tweet. Always try and help the original tweeter out. In the shoes case, if they say “OMG my shoes are so old, going shopping tomorrow, I want some nikes” I would reply back at them and say “Hey why don’t you check out [yourdomain], we offer a ton of sales for nike sneakers” This will not only drive VALUABLE traffic to your site, you connect to a person that will be visiting your website.

Tweeting to people will vary, and try not to say the same thing to every person. Always ReTweet (RT) people that say something funny or interesting, and constantly @reply people, they love it.

Post daily tweets about new arrivals and industry news. Once in a while a “Did you know?” tweet is good. Always tweet when you write a new blog post and link to it.  Tweeting can pay off and lead to easy sales, however it can be time consuming to someone with a full time job.

NEVER SPAM TWITTER WITH AUTO UPDATES. People will see this and stop following you. It doesn’t drive traffic or sales. If you post helpful tweets, people will look at your account higher, and come and visit your site.

When you find a SEO company, most likely they will ask for your domain so they can look over your site and run reports on your content. We ask the question of how and what do they do

When I check a site out this is what I do

1. Check PageRank, the age of the domain, Google/ Yahoo Indexed pages, and Yahoo LinkDomain. I will do this to see how their site has done in the search engines.
   • PageRank and Google’s Indexed Pages. I can determine by the indexed pages how much exposure a site gets, and the PageRank will let me know what Google thinks of the site. If I see that a site has been around since 2003 and has a PageRank of 0, I know this site is doing something very wrong.
   • Analyzing Yahoo LinkDomain will give me a sense of how connected this site is with the community. Do they comment on other blogs. Forums? Do people write about their site?
2. Look at the overall design and source code of the site.
   • Link structure is very important in seo. Let’s use an eCommerce website for this example. Does the link look like this http://mysite.com/productid?=8a72373d6? Or is the link optimized like this http://mysite.com/category/brand-name/product-name. Ensure that the product keyword and brand names are in the link. Google loves this.
   • Do they use the correct tags for images?
   • Are they using proper Meta descriptions and keywords? Do they keyword stuff?
   • How is their source code? Do they properly use <title>,<h1> and <h2> tags? Do they use tables in their design?
   • Does the site pass w3c validation?
3. Do they take advantage of social networking?
   • Does your prospective client use facebook, twitter, digg, suquddo, etc?

These methods won’t take me very long to see. I use one particular firefox extension to assist me with determining some of this information. SEO Quake is a great tool that I use daily to check out websites. You will need HTML knowledge to analyze the source code, and you should look at the company’s name in Google or Yahoo look more into them.

Update: If you want your site checked out by me, leave your domain in the comments box. Its free.

Please follow us on twitter, our user name is TheSEOBlog. We will tweet our latest blog posts and any useful things we find around the internet. We will show you at a later time how to successfully use twitter to market your business.

Tweet @TheSEOBlog

Quality back links are essential in beating your competition. No longer do two way “link swaps” work. I use LinkDiagnosis.com to analyze my competition’s links. LinkDiagnosis will analyze their Yahoo In links, and then pass it through the Google API to determine their page rank, and if the link is a DoFollow, or NoFollow. In just 3 hours I was able to scan many competitors and find blogs where the comments were DoFollow. You can see just so much valuable information on this site.

Contact the webmasters of the high PR sites and ask to write an article for them. DO NOT have a set email template asking for a link swap, its not 1999.