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Improve your Google ranking with 24-year experienced SEO professional Peter Mahoney

Spam twits (stop the Twitter spam)

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Spam twits (stop the Twitter spam) Wordpress SEO ExpertChanges are, you’ve a bunch of Twitter followers that aren’t proper followers at all—just a series of fake accounts set up to try to entice you into a spam relationship.

It’s easy to prevent getting spam from these accounts, just don’t follow them. The usual methodology of a spam account is to follow thousands upon thousands of legitimate users, and hope that some of them friend them back.

We’ve all done it, just like most of us did in our early Facebook use. “Oh, look, someone wants to be my friend. Well, I do want to get my number of friends up, because then I appear more popular and might win some non-existent perceived race to have higher numbers on my profile).

We were fools.

So, after deciding to not follow the spammer back, you’re safe, right? Well, not so much. For a start you’re still open to getting direct messages (DMs) from fake accounts. Plus they can still easily mention you (@yourname) which will get both your, and your friends’, attention.

But here’s the real kicker to be aware of.  It’s really easy for anyone to see how many fake accounts follow you, and therefore how many actual, engaged folloswers you have.

How big is your sphere of influence, really?

Fake Follow Check will tell you, and anybody else who cares to search fro you, exactly how big it is. And how many fake accounts follow you. If you’ve a large percentage of fake accounts on your follow list, you’ll be perceived as having bought followers, and therefore a bit dubious at best. (Even though I did it myself, to prove a point).

I can see within seconds that @justinbieber, the most followed (and therefore, perceived as the most popular) person on Twitter, has 38,508,154 accounts receiving his tweets. Of which 34% are known fake accounts. and a further 29% are inactive accounts.

So while he does have 14,248,016 legitimate followers, his reported statistic is way off.

Before I start looking up to someone in business, I want to know how successful they are, and how many other people look up to them. This tool really shatters some illusions, but does help me spend my time and money more wisely.

http://fakers.statuspeople.com

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Social integration

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Social networking is much more than an SEO technique. And while the point of this series is to focus on improving your search engine ranking and visibility, it would be reductionist (and actually really difficult) to talk about social media and it’s relationship to your business without discussing community.

After all, as important as SEO is, its purpose is to build your community of clients, and therefore that tribe of people is the most important thing.

While previous posts in this series focussed on a number of different things you can do, with this topic it all runs together and is a more conceptual dialogue.

Backlinks

At its simplest, the explanation of a backlink is, well, simple. Search engines scan social networks and basically count all the links to articles and content on other sites. If you have 50 links back to one article you wrote, you’ll be seen as having more authority than a site which only gets five.

It’s worth noting that social backlinks are given a fairly low importance by the big search engines, so unsurprisingly a link to your post from an article on The Guardian website carries a lot more gravitas. More on that in the next point.

They are however very useful, because they do offer some weight to your content, and it’s very easy to share content on social media. You’ll notice at the end of all my blog posts is a share feature—I click all those buttons myself to share my content. It’s the easiest way.

Photos/graphics/images

Before you share your article, make sure it has an image as part of it. Facebook and Linkedin both include a graphic from your content next to the link, and links with images get more clicks. Simple.

A word of advice here from personal experience—make sure you have an image in place before you even try to share your content via Facebook once, even if it’s just a test. Facebook caches the content on links, so if you post once without a graphic and then you remember that you really should have included one so you go back and edit your post then share again—Facebook is probably not going to bother looking for any changes. And you’re stuck with a text-only link.

Social networks

You have a bunch of options for places to post to:

  • Facebook is a no-brainer. Have a page on it, and post your content to it. Make sure the privacy for your posts is “public”, and even if you have very few “likes”, at least the backlinks are there.
  • Twitter is a no-brainer. It’s short, simple, scanned by Google in near real-time, and again, even if you have very few interactions on that network the links to your content exist.
  • Linkedin is, for almost every professional business, a no-brainer. It’s where professionals find each other, discuss their industries, and again, if nothing else you’ve got links back to your content.
  • Blogs should be a no-brainer. Their potential as social networking is often overlooked, but those comments sections are valuable. Read an article, a few of the comments, then post your own reply with a link to your site. Backlinks ahoy. I include online newspapers and the link as blogs for this purpose; they’re very widely read. Here’s a top tip. Once a week, read a really popular blog about your industry. Take 10 minutes to write your own thoughts on the subject, and post that to your blog. Then comment on the industry blog saying, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and here’s my recent blog post that might help enlighten things.” Boom. Your traffic goes up, and you have original content linked to on a popular site—it doesn’t matter that you did it yourself.
  • Tumblr is a great one too. We’re now in the realm of the networks I call “time-allowing”, because while it’d be nice to hit up every network out there, I also hope you’re busy making money. But this is worth having a presence on, and sharing your ideas through.
  • Google+ (a.k.a. Google Plus). I use it because funnily enough, Google search knows what’s happening on its own social network. I haven’t made much of setting up my Google+ presence yet simply because there are so many hours in the week. However, I still think this network shows promise for really taking off, and if it does, I want to be established there while other people are playing catch up.
  • Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. They’re all worth a go, and are essentially social bookmarking services. People share bookmarks, rate them up or down, that kind of thing. The one to be slightly wary of is Reddit though—while it can drive some serious traffic to your site, they have a very close-knit community of users; and if they grab hold of content they don’t like for one reason or another they will tear it to shreds. And with it your ego.

Community

This is really important, because it’s not just backlinks that you want, it’s to have people taking about them, interacting, and ultimately sharing themselves. That in turn brings other people in, and before you know it you have a community of people to sell to. And this is of course the desirable ultimate result.

But people won’t share content unless it’s right in their faces, and of interest to them. And also importantly, of perceived interest to their friends. People don’t share content on social networks because they think it’s awesome, they share it because they think their friends will think it’s awesome. It’s an important distinction.

Part of this community building is for you to interact with your followers and subscribers. If someone looks like they want to get into a debate, then engage with that. If they retweet something you’ve written, thank them for it. Make them feel included and valued by you. Don’t leave other people’s comments hanging out at the tail end of your posts, reply.

Also consider the nature of a community. If all you ever post is backlinks, people will start to overlook your social content. Twitter is a great example, it’s a very social, social network. Because it’s so quick to post to, and users expect a fair quantity of tweets to be made by other users, ideally you’ll post a couple of times a day with something humorous, or clever, or an original inspiring thought, and perhaps post backlinks three times a week. With this sort of ratio you’re building your community and adding weight to your links.

Find opinion leaders

Within any grouping of people, there are those who the rest look up to, and value their opinions. These are the people who naturally settled into a position at the top of the pack, and set the tone for how people interact, what sorts of things they share, but most importantly decide what will be valued by the group. Marketers are always trying to find these people and to get them onside. Have you ever seen those giveaways on Facebook where if you share an advert, and get the most “likes” for it, you win something? Well those campaigns aren’t just about getting brands shared about, they also allow the marketers to see who gets the most likes—and these are the opinion leaders they know to target their advertising towards in future.

My wife is an opinion leader amongst her peers. Whenever she comments on one of my Facebook page’s posts, or shares it with her friends, that post reaches about five times as many people as a normal one.

Opinion leaders make your shares, backlinks, and social communities much more effective. And bear in mind you want to be one of these people yourself. The go-to-person for a section of your industry. Experts and gurus are opinion leaders.

So start acting like one. 🙂

You probably don’t need Microsoft Office

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There’s a reason people abbreviate Microsoft to M$—it’s incredibly expensive.

But it gets bought out of habit, because it’s something most computer users have been using for over a decade, and surely the most popular product must be the best, right?

Something that has long annoyed me about the computer industry is the way the stack the deck when it comes to needing the newest thing.

Case in point: the latest version of Office comes out. You head down to the store to buy it, because they have this new fancy “x” on the end of the file extensions and you want to make sure your files will play nicely with most other people.

Whoops, your old operating system won’t work with it. And your computer is too old to run the newest version of Windows, so why not just buy a new computer?

It’s got more processing power than the average simian brain, produces more colours than were previously known to science, and runs faster than a cheetah on heat*.

Or just put this process in reverse—a new computer, with a new OS, needs a new version of Office.

And why can your old computer NOT run something as simple as a word processing program? Simple: they bloat it.

They stick in fancier looking buttons, more help files, extra layers of stuff you’ll never even know about, and the only reason for doing so is to sell you a newer version of their product.

But if they didn’t, the old system would probably last you for years doing just what you need; Internet access, word processing, and email.

Enter OpenOffice (and it’s fork, LibreOffice). It’s an Office suite with everything you need; word processing, spreadsheets, presentations—and it’s free. It’s maintained by a community of skilled volunteers who are dedicated to seeing computing be an open experience, not one based on finance and money making for a few huge companies.

Best of all, it’s files are compatible with Office anyway. And it will open Office files, so you don’t need to recreate anything you already have. It doesn’t need massive amounts of processing power because it’s built to perform a function, rather than sell units.

Increasingly my client’s of mine are sending me files that have been made using OpenOffice, so the uptake is good.

But if you’ve not tried it out already, I highly recommend you do. It’s an example of what online communities can achieve. It’s also very, very awesome.

OpenOffice.org

* I have no idea if Cheetah’s run faster when on heat. Or indeed, if they do experience “heat” like domestic cats. Feel free to let me know!

I can make you an awesome, SEO’d personal online brand

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It’s true.

I spent much of last year involved in making personal brands for people to improve their search engine rankings, industry positioning, and overall getting them in more clients and more revenue.

On the back of my 17 years web development/design experience, my decade long history of helping people with their social networking, and months of testing and improving my system, I’ve created a personal branding product that will do wonders for you, your reputation, and of course your income.

Currently it’s only being offered through People Per Hour (PPH), but watch this space–when I’ve got a few more of these under my belt you can expect this package to cost over £700.

Right now it’s just £167!

Facebook groups error

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It happened to me.

I logged into Facebook yesterday to find the list of groups I was a part of was huge. Well over a hundred, some I left years ago, some I barely recognised (short lived in-jokes from 2007) and others I wish I didn’t remember.

I was suddenly a member of every group I’d ever joined, even ones that had been deleted years ago.

Further proof that Facebook really does remember everything we do—forever.

To make matters worse, groups I set up, and had needed to remove people a few people from over the years (for unacceptable behaviour) had all the offenders and their content reinstated.

Facebook have admitted there was a mistake, which on the one hand is positive, at least they’re standing up to say an error was made.

I don’t think they’re being honest about how many people it’s affected. Everyone I’ve interacted with over the past 24 hours has had it crop up. But my main concern is simply that an error like this was able to happen. People who had left groups, private, closed groups, were now able to see all the content since they left.

It was a mistake sure, but mistakes of this magnitude shouldn’t be happening in a company the size of Facebook. I’m beginning to wonder if I test the online communities, sites and systems I’m involved with more rigorously.

After all, I’ve never had a privacy scare. Not one. 🙂

When all is said and done though, and statements are issued and emergency fixed made, here’s my final take on the whole thing:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/petermahoney/status/274091747422916608″]

LinkedIn; a kitten free zone.

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I’m the first to admit, I struggled with LinkedIn at first. Not that it’s hard to use or anything, in fact it’s incredibly simple. But I struggled to find its place in my social-media-life.

I’ve had my profile up there for years, and I’d fleshed it out (past jobs, current responsibilities, photo, all the things that seemed important) but I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

All my colleagues and ex-colleagues were on Facebook. LinkedIn let me post messages and share other people’s updates, but so much less then my other social profiles.

Then I started using it regularly; I just made sure I logged in a couple of times a week. Recommended a couple of people. Wrote to someone I could only find on LinkedIn that I hadn’t spoken to for a while.

Before I knew it I became a regular. And the more I used it, the more people found me. Job offers, professional queries, community discussions, they’ve all become an important part of what I do.

I’ve found even people I do communicate with elsewhere interact differently on LinkedIn. We act in the way we want to present ourselves to our workmates, bosses and clients.

The first is to post directly to it. In this case you’re just giving away your content for free to a massive company. They’ll get the SEO authority for that post, not you. And while you might plan to have a link to your site on the bottom of those posts you give them, links coming out of their website are marked as nofollow, which means they don’t get used by Google (or other major search engines) as a way of passing on authority.

Oh and of course some folks repost, posting the content on the social network and their own site. Which simply leads to duplicate content issues.

The second method is to just post a link to the article as it appears on your site. So you’re sharing a link rather than the text. The trouble again is that those links are nofollow, so you won’t get any SEO juice for it.

But social networks are generally quite protective of their own SEO authority, they’re not in the business of passing that on to anyone who posts on their platforms. SO I prefer that second option, just link back to your own site. Forget about social networks for SEO. But it’s still good to interact with people on them, and hopefully those users might follow a link to your own site – then they’re your audience.

One really positive thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn though is it’s easy to accidentally give them your SEO authority. SEO authority is a way of referring to the search engine kudos, or points you might have. There are traditionally two ways most people publish content on LinkedIn.

This is the advantage of LinkedIn. Not only can you build your online community, but you can be sure that your interactions on it are going to be framed in a professional manner, and of a higher quality. To this day I’ve not seen a single photo of a kitten on LinkedIn.

Please don’t be the first.

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