SEO is synonymous with ranking on the first SERP page in Google. Optimizing a site for Google means getting links, many links, no matter what. Defining and redefining SEO will not change the way these people perceive it. This is not an article for them. Those webmasters who optimize solely for Google are basically targeting only 70% of the search engine market, and disregarding the rest.

This is for those who have heard of social networking but don’t exactly know how it applies to SEO and want to use all possible SEO channels to drive more traffic and to gain more customers. This article will prove what “real” SEO value is to be expected from services like Twitter.

Does twitter Pass Any Link Juice?

Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its “SEO value” has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google’s SERPs. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

According to compete.com, Ask.com owns about 2.5% of the search engine market share. The same source shows that in November 2008 there were 255 million search queries on Ask.com. This is nothing compared to 7235 millions on Google, but can you seriously disregard a source of such traffic? Ask.com is a potential gate for visitors that could convert into customers.

So let’s ask the question again, shall we? Does Twitter pass any link juice? For Ask.com it does.

Do tinyURL Shortened URLs Have SEO Value?

The short answer is yes. TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead. The problem with Twitter, as we already discussed, is the “nofollow” attribute added to all submitted links.

Are There Any Other Possible SEO Advantages with Twitter?

As I already said, SEO is not only about building links. Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. “Creating” is “onsite SEO.” “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”

Every time you submit your site to a directory you “promote it” – meaning that you do “offsite SEO.” Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web a gate to your site is being opened. People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.

When visitors land on a page from an exterior link some other metrics are affected: number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on site. These metrics matter for the search engines more and more; since all other variables are so easily gamed (links and keywords are all subject to spam and black hat SEO strategies).

To make a long story short: although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss.

Before starting your SEO strategy, it is important to first know who your online competitors are and what kind of online marketing tactics they are already engaging in. You will want to take some time to research and analyze your competitors to gain intelligence and hopefully stay one step ahead of them.

Here are some guidelines and questions to consider while performing research on the Internet about your competitors:

Website Design and Layout

Are your competitors using a search engine friendly Web design, like a basic HTML or ASP site?

• Are they using JavaScript, a dynamically-driven site, frames, or tables that will prevent search engines from properly indexing their sites?

• Are any Web sites built entirely in flash?

• Are their sites easy to navigate with a professional look and feel by using the same font styles and sizes and similar color schemes throughout?

• How heavily are the graphics on the Web site?

• How many Web pages total does each of your competitors have on their site? Does your site need improvement on the amount of content-rich Web pages you have?

• Does the entire Web site focus on one central theme alone?

Placement of Keywords

• Where are your competitors using their chosen keywords? The META title tag? The META description tag? The META keywords tag? In ALT tags? What about in link text and headline tags? The page URL? Image names?

• How often do those keywords appear on each Web page?

• Where does each of their keywords first appear on the pages of each of your competitors sites?

• Are they achieving good rankings for their chosen keywords online in Google, MSN and Yahoo!?

• What is the keyword weight and density of the entire content of your competitors’ pages? Are they keyword spamming?

• What are their chosen keywords being targeted on their sites? Are they single words or long-tail keywords with 3, 4 or even 5 keyword phrases?

Off Page Factors

• Check your competitors Alexa.com and Compete.com traffic rank and compare with yours. Do they receive more or less Web traffic to their sites?

• What is their Google PageRank? Again, is it higher or lower than yours?

• Go to a reputable link popularity checker online and compare the number of incoming links your site has versus your competitors. How much improvement in link building, if any, does your site need to effectively compete online?

• What types of incoming links are they receiving, how top quality are these links, and how much traffic does a link from these sites generate for your competitors each month?

• Are any of your competitors registered with any popular link directories, like dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com or other similar high traffic directories online?

• Do they have a sign up box for an industry email newsletter on their sites?

Use of Spamming Techniques

• Is the competitor’s site using any spam or unethical search engine practices? If so, what are they?

• Do any of these sites have doorway or gateway pages?

• Do they have same color text on a same color background?

• Are they blatantly keyword spamming?

• Are these sites publicly listed or affiliated with gambling or adult-oriented sites?

Yes, these are basics for you advanced guys out there, but take a look at this list again and think of the couple of tactics you don’t look at on a regular basis. Ah, yes we may have studied all of these tactics but not using them regularly may give missed opportunities in the long run.

Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

Ok so we have heard of the major social media players, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, yada, yada, yada. Weird names but cutting edge technology. We have all have them and most are addicted. (yes, at one point, I was checking my myspace page about 10 times a day!). These site are so popular due their ease of use and of course, they are all free! At the beginning teens and young adults were creating profiles, uploading pics and videos for free expression. Then steps in the marketers and the huge opportunity presented. What a great concept.

Material created extremely cheap (man hours in most cases) and then presented to millions of potential customers. Fast forward about a year and now you have these large communities and millions of dollars pouring in for their founders. Many others, including myself want to hop on this bandwagon. Trouble is, who can compete with these global giants? well many just figured they could just expand on these applications and hopefully gain some interest. Most of the social networks have provided API’s for developers to build their own applications inside the networks which have provided more user engagement. Most don’t have a clue about any of these applications so I figured I would highlight a few as found on other blogs. They social media sites and applications that support them are:

Digg
A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://digg.com when they reach a certain threshold.

Digg Alerter is an absolute must have for any user interested in keeping track of their submissions.

“Digg Alerter is a program that sits in your system tray and alerts you whenever your stories are dugg or promoted to the front page. Simply specify your Digg username and the program will automatically keep you updated.”

1. Bury Recorder
   Another great tool that allows you to track buries on any given submission. This tool will display the type of bury, number of diggs at time of bury, and the time and date a bury was received.

   Bury Recorder utilizes the Digg Spy API tool, which is reported to only show a small amount of the overall Digg activity and thus could be inaccurate. It is still a great tool and very helpful.

   For additional Digg tools, check out this post by DoshDosh – 12 Must-Have Tools for Digg Users.

2. Reddit
   A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Unlike other social sites, Reddit doesn’t have a system that promotes stories to a front page. Reddit sorts all their submissions in numerical order, based on their current voting based score. The main page on http://reddit.com shows the top 25 ranked stories.Reddit River is a mobile version of reddit.com. It is 3 times as light (in size) and automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on Reddit. It also supports viewing the various SubReddits.

   

   For a really good and complete article on how to succeed on Reddit, check out 10e20’s post on Reddit.

3. StumbleUpon
   A browser guided social community where users can vote web content up or down from their installed tool bar. Each time you press the “Stumble!” button, you are shown a new page, based on the categories you have subscribed to in your options.StumbleUpon Alerter is another great tool from Adamant Solutions and provides a great view at your StumbleUpon account’s activity.

   

   You can quickly see who is voting on your discoveries, and how many votes and comments each discovery has received. You can also analyze your friends’ activity and see which of your discovered domains performs better.

   Make sure to check out DoshDosh’s really comprehensive article on StumbleUpon.

4. Propeller
   Very similar to Digg in that it is a community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://propeller.com when they reach a certain threshold.PropellerTray is a tool that allows you to see the vote and comment count on each of the content pieces you submitted to Propeller.com.
5. Twitter Service for people to quickly communicate and stay connected with other users. You can follow specific people and see their Twitter messages.

1. Twhirl is a great desktop tool for Twitter users. It allows you to do almost everything you can on Twitter but in a small window that resembles an IM chat window. In addition, the tool allows you to receive up to 3 recent Twitter messages in a quick view window similar to that of a new email in Outlook.
2. TwitterFeed allows you to publish an RSS feed into your Twitter account.

You can find some other interesting Twitter tools in Barbara Boser’s post on Twitter tools.

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2. Facebook The StumbleUpon Application allows you to share any pages you have discovered or voted upon on your Facebook profile.Digg has also released a Facebook application to display your Digg activity on your profile.

1. The Social Media tool or Firefox
   A must have additional to your social media tool arsenal. It allows you to single click buttons, at the bottom of your browser, for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, to easily submit whatever page you are currently on.You can also switch the tool over to “automatic” and it will display the vote counts for the various social communities next to links on any website you are browsing.

The above tools have made my social media experience much easier and more productive. There are many great tools out that can really help improve your social media experience, so get out there, tool up, and Be Social Media.

This is an interesting debate due to the recent influx in blogging. With the low cost, virtually free, and low maintenance it seems like a no-brainer. Or is it? Take me for example. I have a ton of other projects on my plate and haven’t blogged in a while. You don’t have to post every day, but unless you can come up with enough interesting topics to justify posting on a fairly regular basis, blogging may not be the best alternative for you.

A blog post should be written because you are an expert or genuinely care about a certain topic not because you feel a need to throw a post out there. I scan 20-30 blogs a day and read only about 2-5. Why you ask? Well, most of the content is not groundbreaking or adding to my seo knowledge.

Blogging also involves writing skills. I got my B.A. in journalism and mass communications but do I enjoy writing? well yes and no. I don’t consider myself a talented writer and don’t always get my point across in the most clear, and proper ways but I do enjoy expressing my opinion and teaching others what I’ve learned.

And how biased are you? Yes, blogging is an expression of opinion and your company may stress certain things like touting a certain product or service which is good for selling and SEO for the page but keep it minimal. Don’t put you should buy xyx because, you should buy xyz because…Let the reader get informed and use it for branding at first. Remember, blogs are not the selling point, they are there to compliment your products or services so the majority of your SEO efforts should focus on your website.

With these in mind, it’s ultimately up to you if a blog is worth it.