I love Twit Cleaner!
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For all the people saying that you just need the social media to be a marketing success – 4/10 people are 100% inaccessible to you.

Measuring Use of Social Networking Sites.

Typically, these are older people, like those who still want to print the materials on your site and ask to be mailed brochures.

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It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming! (more…)

Social media generates ROI in the form of networking benefits.

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I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email: (more…)

M.-J. Taylor is a moderator on V7N’s forums and has been working in SEO since 1997. She’s recently launched a SEO & social blog and offers services via her site Cyber-Key , focused on the web design and SEO in the Florida Keys.

How did you get involved with V7N?

I was a moderator on WebProWorld and kept hearing about V7N from other members. I checked it out. It wasn’t the most learned forum I’d ever visited, but it was the friendliest. I was made to feel welcome and a “part of.” And I felt I was needed, as well as wanted. (more…)

A friendly business acquaintance of mine, Jean-Julien of Sid Lee, asked this question recently on Quora. I thought I’d answer here for the benefit of my readers.

The question is kind of futile, in my view. It’s the same way many marketing award shows are only aimed at promoting themselves (they charge thousands per submission…). Just as those award shows don’t really pinpoint the best in the country, it would be impossible to answer this question accurately without doing a comprehensive rating… and none of these answers (award shows, surveys, etc) are ever really comprehensive. (more…)

This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

The Google Panda Update hit many webmasters like a freight train, leaving a long line of quality websites as collateral damage.  While the Panda update did have the noble cause of weakening the grip that content farms had on the SERPs, many high-quality, content-rich websites were cleaned from Google in one fail swoop.  To address the outrage found across the blogosphere, Google has provided a list of questions to ask yourself if you want your rankings to return.

From the list of questions Google provided, I’d like to propose 3 cheap solutions that could help get you back in Google’s favor.

1.  Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

I think it is a little ridiculous of Google to even consider this as something to base rankings on, but I won’t get very far arguing with them (I’ll leave that to Aaron Wall).

The question is, what could we possibly do to have Google think the answer for this is ‘yes’ for our website?   Remember, they are doing this via algorithm, so it’d be pretty hard for them to analyze our design or look for other superficial indicators of trust.

However, there are ‘tangible’ items that they can check for to indicate trust, and  what makes the most sense to me is for Google to check for the ‘Verisign Verified’ seal.  It’d be pretty easy for Google to look for this, and if it is there, the website gets the box checked on this question.  At ~$19/month, its a minimal investment if your website was previously making a great deal of money but took a big Panda hit.

2.  Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

This question does have merit, but I really doubt Google’s sophistication to check for deep stylistic and grammar errors. While the built-in Microsoft Word grammar check is ok and probably on par with what Google would be able to do (my speculation), Apple’s built in grammar check is atrocious.

Rather than rely on these built-in tools, my preference of late has become a very comprehensive ‘cloud’ grammar check tool called Grammarly.  This tool grades the grammar of an article, performs comprehensive content reviews, and offers rich suggestions for improving the quality of an article.  At around $10/month, it is well worth the investment and I’m pretty confident it’s much more comprehensive in reviewing content than Google could ever be (because grammar isn’t the space Google operates in full-time).

3.  Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

The recent ranking correlation data gathered and analyzed by SEOmoz is nothing short of shocking. Of all of the metrics they track, Facebook Shares (not ‘Likes’) have the highest correlation to rankings.  Google’s question on ‘sharing’ here, plus this corellation data, leads me to believe that Facebook and other social shares could be a critical signal in the Panda algorithm.  There are hundreds of tools to help in this space, but I’d like to point out a few of my favorites… and the best part is, these are free!

• ShareThis – Put this button at the end of your article.  It’ll give people an opportunity to easily share your content across a number of social and bookmarking sites.
• fbShare.me –  Facebook is making it more difficult to do ‘sharing’ and instead favors their ‘Like’ button.  Sharing on Facebook means that it can show up in another users ‘Top News’, whereas just ‘Liking’ a piece of content will not show up in one of your friend’s ‘Top News’. This handy little widget does all of the work for you to get ‘Share’ on your site.

In addition to these two tools, increasing your overall engagement in social media will ensure that your content constantly stays in people’s various social streams.

So there you have it, 3 tools that can help you beat the Panda update.  Matt Cutts has indicated that the Panda algorithm is not run daily, so it could take some time to bounce back after implementing all of the various changes being suggested.

This is one of the most sweeping updates Google has performed, and sites caught in the cross-fire can expect numerous tweaks and adjustments by Google as time goes by. By focusing on what Google is saying publicly about the update, we can attempt to make educated guesses on how to satisfy the various pieces of the algorithm.

This interview with David Wallace of SEM Firm SearchRank was part of a series of interviews I ran with prominent members of Sphinn. Note that these were carried out a couple of years ago, and thus are partly dated – but also interesting to see what still holds true and what predictions have come true.

See the full list of previous interviews at the end of this post, for more interviews.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?
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Earlier in 2010 I had the good fortune to be offered a free review membership at PPCBlog.com in exchange for a review. With the necessary disclosure given, here’s my take on PPC Blog. (more…)

Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry, Bob Gladstein, Bill Hartzer and Wiep Knol.

Tadeusz Szewcyk, aka Tad Chef for short, does German SEO and writes the longstanding and successful SEO 2.0 blog.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

A name and reputation in the global SEO industry. Ability to discuss virtually with industry leaders. Being bookmarked, stumbled and mixxed by people who notice me on Sphinn. Getting authority, topical links. Ego massage.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

Avatar, networking with other Sphinn users on many different platforms, catchy titles, being provocative without harming people, voting for others.

3) What other social networks do you participate in? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

StumbleUpon – onreact-com, Mixx – onreact.com, Pownce, Blogcatalog

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

Submissions and votes per URL view, report shady SEO directly to Matt Cutts, Sphinn member of the day Entrecard like rotation on Search Engine Land.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at playing on 'social media' that no one I asked this of understood. = bad joke]

Both

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto, except Tad got this hehe.]
I don’t like postmodern puns. Done them when postmodernism was en vogue and I wanted to be a linguist 15 years ago.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Focusing on quantity not quality. Focusing on traffic not people. Focusing on traffic not reputation. Being too much about business.

8 ) Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Art, design, politics.

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Reciprocation, liking, authority: I had a really tough time on Sphinn to get noticed, none of my first 20 posts went hot.

Only after getting linked, stumbled and being voted for by me people started noticing me. Then they liked me so much I was submitted and voted up on Sphinn with everything, even stuff that was mediocre.

Now this phase is over but I already gained the authority to make people read my stuff at least. So if my submission rocks it will still get hot.

10) What is the future of social media?

Social media will go mainstream for real while the audiences will get scattered around many interconnected platforms.

[Ed: Astonishingly accurate prediction!]

For more awesome interviews, add my rss feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email!

Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry, Bob Gladstein and Wiep Knol.

Bill Hartzer is an expert SEO who also engages in corporate B2B website marketing.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

As an online marketer, it’s important to have a presence in the industry. (more…)

Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place, as well as Twitter not being mentioned). Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Bob Gladstein, Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry.

Wiep runs the popular Link Building Blog aka Wiep.net, and co-founded LinkBuilding.nl which you’ll agree is pretty self-explanatory. (It’s part of the inspiration for me to get off my ass and do something with linkbuilding.ca …)

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

Sphinn turned out to be not only a great networking tool, but also the perfect place to find outstanding SEO related info. (more…)

Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry.

Bob Gladstein is the chief boss man (my words) at Raise My Rank, which offers SEO services in Somerville, MA. To thank him for his kindness with this interview, I’ve hotlinked the picture on his about page. ;D

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?
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Those of you familiar with my scratchpad articles know that this is informal, braindump writing.

Yes, the formatting and grammar sucks and it’s in note form.

But the substance will kick your ass across the Channel, Matilda. (more…)

Patrick Altoft directs search for Branded3, a Leeds-based full service digital agency. He also runs the popular Blogstorm SEO blog and is a pretty interesting guy to chat to overall! Hit him up if you’re looking for search services in the UK!
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Sebastian is the technical genius and SEO behind Sebastian’s Pamphlets. This warm fellow’s well-known avatar is rather ironic – a crab! (more…)

While measuring relationships should be the paradigm for social media analytics tools, relationship building is just an intermediate step for any marketing campaign. Ultimately, marketing needs to drive financial metrics found on balance sheets or income statements.

But the ROI you can derive from social media isn’t uniform across communities. (more…)

A long, long time ago… almost 2 years to the month… I asked a bunch of cool Sphinners I was getting to know for their advice and insights on that great search marketing network we know as Sphinn. For various reasons, I never published those interviews – until now! (SEOptimise reminded me.) In light of Twitter and Facebook‘s exponential growth in the past 2 years, the changes in the link graph this has engendered, and related developments, these answers are pretty interesting.

Dave runs the seo training center known as the Dojo. He’s got some remarkable testimonials, not least of which because of who is giving them. I recognized 4-5 names.

“Well sheee-it there monsieur Gabs, not sure what use this will be but I said I would give ‘er a go and I shall…. Right away I just wanted to say that while I appreciate your kind words and invitation to get social, I spend as much time playing the devil’s advocate in the world of Social Media Marketing as I do supporting it. I am certainly not a social media darling ( almost a Social Media Ninja though….)

Without further ado… let’s get into it;

What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn ?

Well, I suppose the real benefits have been;

1. Making new friends
2. Padding my address book
3. Maxing out my reader
4. Some increased visibility
5. And of course access to learning something new every day (more…)

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington, and his wife, an architect and photographer, at Johwey!

As the solo in-house SEO for Fatwallet, it is important that I keep up with the constant changes of the industry. My two staple conferences have been SESNY and Pubcon Vegas. Last spring I was toying with the idea of attending Pubcon South instead of SES when Danny Sullivan told me to skip both and go to SMX Advanced. I decided to go to New York. Big mistake. SES sucked, and the SMX Advanced conference was blessed with the nofollow pagerank evaporation announcement. (more…)

I was reading this post by Ann Smarty on SalesForce’s brilliant WP plugin, and it reminded of recent news from BuzzStream. BuzzStream are like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but for link prospects. And they just added Twitter functionality.

Any link builder worth his salt knows that the best links are about repeatability.
And relationships are a big part of making links repeatable.
Twitter builds relationships.
Ergo, Twitter makes repeatable links possible.

It used to be the case that you had to copy-paste or do manual data entry if you were building relationships for clients on Twitter and using BuzzStream as your link prospect manager.
Now you can just synchronize Twitter and BuzzStream and your efforts will be pulled in directly.

Win!

Longtime readers will recall that human resource managers should be measuring social media for your company. This also ties in to using Twitter as a community, which imho is more efficient than seeing it as a broadcast platform.

If you like this post on tools/social/link building, check out my advanced SEO book and get a free chapter.

Yesterday, I described what I saw as a trend towards content communities becoming commodified. We ended on the question – how do you build a competitive advantage in such a case? (more…)

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities. (more…)

As my friend Mike Gray pointed out at SMX Advanced, RTing is a great way to get people’s attention and build a relationship with them. The difficulty is getting people’s attention when they write a really popular post that gets RTed 100+ times.

So here’s the greyhat solution. (more…)

(Image by Josh Russell) What’s your real Twitter reach? People keep mistakenly promoting the tactic of getting tens of thousands of followers on Twitter by following everyone else, for the sake of having massive influence with any single tweet. But if everyone followed everyone else – the logical conclusion of this tactic – then the tactic dies. Because the attention given to any one tweet would be so tiny as to be meaningless.

Your Twitter stream would amount to a blur of tweets. In that case, no one would have very much broadcasting influence, even though everyone has millions of followers.

So I came up with some simple math to calculate your true Twitter broadcasting reach / influence. (more…)

1. You need social proof? “As Seen In [the following media]” is a popular and well-trusted form of social proof. So next time you run a campaign, why not hit up Google News for inspiration, plus the internal search functions of major news networks and trade publications? (more…)

Aha! I finally realized why measuring relationships is the best way to measure social media results! Two words: Opportunity Cost. (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

I can’t be the only one who comments on a photo and wants to see what responses, if any, the comment gets. And with Facebook expanding commenting to anything that can show up in the news feed, such as status updates, shared video/audio/image content, this app is even more important. This could easily be a top 10 app. The question is just how would you monetize it? Make it a branding move for your blog platform, maybe?

Footnote: This would help those users with naked pics of themselves on Facebook…

The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest peer-to-peer site, which focuses on torrent technology – lets you view what people are searching for (Not Safe For Work (NSFW)) as well as its tag cloud (NSFW), which I presume is what people are sharing, in the most literal sense.

At the risk of stating what may be obvious to most SEOs, when pirates share their booty, keyword research is a lot easier. (more…)

I’ve written before about what I see as the correct paradigm for measuring social media success: the strength of the relationships you’ve built. I’ve been aware of FriendFeed for a while, but I wasn’t aware what it was precisely. And more importantly, I didn’t know that it had an API.

I’m aware of both now. So FYI: you can create a basic social media analytics software/platform. (more…)

The video with my thoughts and questions is after the jump. Please give me some feedback on this – what can I do for you guys? (more…)

Angelo Racoma wrote an excellent piece at Performancing on how the web affects our social skills in the offline world. His point is that it makes us shy to meet people face to face and kind of lazy about actually communicating with folks. I tried posting the following comment, but it didn’t work…

“I’ll bet that’s why there are so many web-oriented conferences! BlogWorld Expo, Web 2.0, SMX series, SES Series, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, AdTech, Affiliates4U, Traffic, TechCrunch 40, … People want to connect with their friends for real!

“I’ve been on both sides of this (more…)

1) You “send” me stuff too frequently. That little red number indicating things friends have shared on SU feels compelling – and if you’re compelling me to pay attention too frequently, it feels abusive and/or needy. Go away.

2) You send me a) junk or b) untargeted non-junk or worst of all c) untargeted junk. Fortunately for you, I’m going to keep it simple so it’s easy to understand: I’ll remove you in all of the above situations. Clear, huh?

Friends don’t annoy friends.

Twitter is a platform (with etiquette, but still a platform). It is home to a number of broad and niche communities. Ditto Facebook. They both provide users with a set of tools and things they can do.

Digg is both a platform and a community, but Pligg (more…)

While I’m usually not the one to swear on a professional blog, there are exceptional occasions where it’s appropriate, and this is one of them. I’m waaaaaay overdue for a links post, and there are so many quality ones here, that I had to use my affiliate friend‘s expression. (more…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

When you and a busload of friends have had several long hours of championship partying in the club where you gave 110%, and you’re still so pumped for overtime that you go over the top for the win – you’re a Hall of Fame member of the Pro Partying Association. (more…)

Big ideas and food for thought:
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One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

I’m in a crap situation, and I need to learn to say no. First, because saying yes is eating into my own time and second because I’m embarassed to admit that I voted for friends’ submissions that were average and not really deserving of votes. (more…)

Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. This is an approach to use as a foundation for creating social media analytics tools, not a tool.

27/05/2011 – Update on Social Media Analytics Tools:

Since this post was written in 2008, lots has happened in social media analytics. For a social media measurement tool, your best bet is BuzzStream. It integrates Twitter with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool so that you automatically track your relationships with Twitter contacts. This ties into a PR and social media tool (or a link building CRM). Read on to find out why this is the best kind of social media analytics…

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Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (more…)

Here’s a refreshing interview with Kat French, well known in the SEOmoz and Sphinn community and certainly a person to keep an eye out for in search marketing. We cover online community moderation, the strength of social media and of personal networks, and much more. (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this. (more…)