Getting followers

1. Use an avatar image, a picture of a person, you is best
2. Only use a logo as avatar in case your brand is already established
3. Link your homepage in your profile, not LinkedIn or FriendFeed etc.
4. Let employees tweet as real people
5. Do not collect many more people you follow than you got followers
6. Describe yourself in a factual not anecdotal way
7. Tweet mostly in English if you’re from non-English speaking countries and target the global market
8. At the beginning promote your Twitter presence so that you gather at least 5o followers
9. Tweet at least a few times a week, do not lurk
10. Do not pose as someone else, especially not a young attractive females, unless you don’t care

Keeping followers

1. If you’re on Twitter for business, limit the private tweets to a reasonable percentage
2. Use direct message only for person to person conversation, not for broadcasting
3. Link to yourself only occasionally
4. Reply to other people, especially when addressed directly
5. Do not tweet dozens of times per hour, that’s flooding
6. Tweet manually not via automated scripts
7. Post tweets directly to Twitter not via crossposting from elsewhere
8. Vote on social sites for people you follow if you like their links but do not vote down if you dislike
9. Be polite and use informal but not too casual langauge
10. Keep conversations concise or otherwise move to another channel (private message, IM, email)

Getting people to react

1. Ask simple and direct questions
2. Break news stories or be among the first to spread them
3. Cover Twitter both on site and on your blog
4. Mention and socialize with already popular and active Twitter users
5. Tweet link to outstanding resources helpful to others
6. Blog about other tweets you read and elaborate on them or collect a few
7. Be outspoken about negative things that annoy you
8. Create a tool geared towards the Twitter audience
9. Be a human being, that is not only a business robot, mention private things others can relate to, like a cat
10. Give away freebies, or at least report when others do

Using the right tools

1. A Twitter client for the device you mostly use to access Twitter
2. A tool that helps you track the mentions of your name, brand or most important keywords
3. A way to gain quick overview on what’s going on, on Twitter
4. Some WordPress blog integration to connect your online presence to the Twitter community
5. A favorite short URL service with analytics, proper redirects etc.

allinanchor:
If you start your query with allinanchor:, Google restricts results to pages containing all query terms you specify in the anchor text on links to the page. For example, [allinanchor: best museums sydney] will return only pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the words “best,” “museums,” and “sydney.”

allintext:
If you start your query with allintext:, Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the text of the page. For example, [allintext: travel packing list] will return only pages in which the words “travel,” “packing,” and “list” appear in the text of the page. This functionality can also be obtained through the Advanced Web Search page, under Occurrences.

allintitle:
If you start your query with allintitle:, Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the title. For example, [allintitle: detect plagiarism] will return only documents that contain the words “detect” and “plagiarism” in the title. This functionality can also be obtained through the Advanced Web Search page, under Occurrences.

allinurl:
If you start your query with allinurl:, Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the URL. For example, [allinurl: google faq] will return only documents that contain the words “google” and “faq” in the URL, such as “www.google.com/help/faq.html”. This functionality can also be obtained through the Advanced Web Search page, under Occurrences.

author:
If you include author: in your query, Google will restrict your Google Groups results to include newsgroup articles by the author you specify. The author can be a full or partial name or email address. For example, [children author:john author:doe] or [children author:doe@someaddress.com] return articles that contain the word “children” written by John Doe or doe@someaddress.com.

cache:
The query cache:url will display Google’s cached version of a web page, instead of the current version of the page. For example, [cache:www.fomaxtech.com] will show Google’s cached version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation home page.
Note: Do not put a space between cache: and the URL (web address).

define:
If you start your query with define:, Google shows definitions from pages on the web for the term that follows. This advanced search operator is useful for finding definitions of words, phrases, and acronyms. For example, [define:blog] will show definitions for “Blog” (weB LOG).

ext:
This is an undocumented alias for filetype:.

filetype:
If you include filetype:suffix in your query, Google will restrict the results to pages whose names end in suffix. For example, [web page evaluation checklist filetype:pdf] will return Adobe Acrobat pdf files that match the terms “web,” “page,” “evaluation,” and “checklist.” You can restrict the results to pages whose names end with pdf and doc by using the OR operator, e.g. [email security filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc].

group:
If you include group: in your query, Google will restrict your Google Groups results to newsgroup articles from certain groups or subareas. For example, [sleep group:misc.kids.moderated] will return articles in the group misc.kids.moderated that contain the word “sleep” and [sleep group:misc.kids] will return articles in the subarea misc.kids that contain the word “sleep.”

id:
This is an undocumented alias for info:.

inanchor:
If you include inanchor: in your query, Google will restrict the results to pages containing the query terms you specify in the anchor text or links to the page. For example, [restaurants inanchor:gourmet] will return pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the word “gourmet” and the page contains the word “restaurants.”

info:
The query info:URL will present some information about the corresponding web page. For instance, [info:gothotel.com] will show information about the national hotel directory GotHotel.com home page.
Note: There must be no space between the info: and the web page URL.
This functionality can also be obtained by typing the web page URL directly into a Google search box.

insubject:
If you include insubject: in your query, Google will restrict articles in Google Groups to those that contain the terms you specify in the subject. For example, [insubject:”falling asleep”] will return Google Group articles that contain the phrase “falling asleep” in the subject.
Equivalent to intitle:.

intext:
The query intext:term restricts results to documents containing term in the text. For instance, [Hamish Reid intext:pandemonia] will return documents that mention the word “pandemonia” in the text, and mention the names “Hamish” and “Reid” anywhere in the document (text or not).
Note: There must be no space between the intext: and the following word.

Putting intext: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allintext: at the front of your query, e.g., [intext:handsome intext:poets] is the same as [allintext: handsome poets].

intitle:
The query intitle:term restricts results to documents containing term in the title. For instance, [flu shot intitle:help] will return documents that mention the word “help” in their titles, and mention the words “flu” and “shot” anywhere in the document (title or not).
Note: There must be no space between the intitle: and the following word.
Putting intitle: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allintitle: at the front of your query, e.g., [intitle:google intitle:search] is the same as [allintitle: google search].

inurl:
If you include inurl: in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL. For instance, [inurl:print site:www.googleguide.com ] searches for pages on Google Guide in which the URL contains the word “print.” It finds pdf files that are in the directory or folder named “print” on the Google Guide website. The query [ inurl:healthy eating ] will return documents that mention the words “healthy” in their URL, and mention the word “eating” anywhere in the document.
Note: There must be no space between the inurl: and the following word.

Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate the site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from the site’s contents.

Over the years, search engines (especially Google) have become more particular about the types of links that you get to your Web site; rightfully so. This week, we’ll focus on several ways to search for quality links.

First, make sure you have some links from the more “trusted” Web directories: Yahoo Directory; Business.com, and Best of the Web. Ideally, you want a link from all three, but a link from at least one is OK. I also recommend submitting your site to DMOZ because it’s free and worth the two minutes it takes to find your category and make a one-time submission. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for the listing to appear.

Depending on your industry, certain “trade journals” or directories may be popular sites. These sites usually rank well in the search results for many of the generic keywords that describe your industry. Links from the “industry” sites will also help your site because the link value will be passed on, and for overall brand and Web site visibility. Just make sure the site is trusted.

How do you determine if a site is trusted? Check Google’s search results to see if the site has sitelinks. Sitelinks are the links (usually between four and eight) which Google shows below the first search result for a query, usually when you search for a company name or a Web site name. These link to internal pages.

siteink

Take, for example, DMOZ. A Google search for “dmoz” shows this is a “trusted site” because sitelinks are shown below the domz search result. If a site has sitelinks and is on-topic to your Web site, then this is a place you want a link from.

RSS – Really simple syndication

RSS is a data format used for providing content updation to users in net. It is used in blogs, news portals, and websites to provide summaries or full descriptions of the new content. In this way the user will not be disconnected from the latest changes and happenings. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays. Its different from book marking in which the user has only a link about a particular webpage or site and to check whether that website has updated its content or not the user has to go that site and check it all by himself. It will be a tiresome job if your list contains a number of websites or if it’s a big site with lots of content. Subscribing to the RSS feeds is a viable option in this regard as the updated contents from all the sites specified will be sent to user. It can be in the form of summary or a full text depending on the site user has the subscription.

Subscribing to RSS doesn’t need submission of E-mail ID, in this way security concerns won’t be an issue to subscribing to RSS feeds.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. The format used in web feed is XML.

Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.

Using social media as an effective link building tactic is still possible but it is no longer as easy as creating profiles, submitting content to social news sites and dominating search engine results pages. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that Google has severely toughened up its standards for sites like MySpace. For marketers, it means a lot more work. For users, it means far less noise and spam in their search results.

Social media optimization is now a relatively delicate process. Traditional link building campaigns often involve blatantly asking for links, or simply buying them. In contrast, social media optimization is only effective if a marketer can convince others to link to material, not by asking, but by creating fantastic content. Most people’s accounts and profiles on social media websites are intrinsically attached to their offline self. Unlike people who run a website that includes a designated “Links” page, social media users are not likely to add a company’s profile as a “friend” or vote for a company’s content just because they’re asked to. The majority of people want their user history on sites like Digg and Reddit, and their friend lists on MySpace and Facebook to reflect something about their personalities. The less socially appealing and more exploited your industry is offline, the harder it will be for you to take advantage of online communities.

The landscape of social media is constantly changing. There is no profile, site or community whose content does not change hourly or, at the most, daily. “Traditional” social media link building, in most respects, was solely spam. Marketers realized that they could get quick, easy non-nofollowed links out of domains whose authority had already been established. There was little need to build a community and, in actual fact, a company who created a spam profile for the sake of linking to their actual websites would not have wanted to attract a great deal of traffic to the profile itself. The primary goal was to have search engine spiders see the profile and the links, add the weight of the links to the authority of the company’s main website and improve the main website’s ranking.

Search engines no longer lend any value whatsoever to links from areas like MySpace profiles. This is not to say, however, that MySpace and its peers are completely useless now; it just means that optimizing with these sites is no longer the simple process it was a few years ago. Search engines and social media website owners alike are aware that the point of social media is not to simply give marketers an easy collection of links. Marketers must now be prepared to contribute to the communities that can send them traffic.

This article documents the procedures and practices that should be followed in order to enjoy the benefits of today’s largest social media entities. With the detailed instructions of how marketers can best optimize these sites, we have also included the quickest, easiest ways to create accounts and add links to other sites. We provide this not because we advocate creating profiles, adding links and not following up with the community in any way, but as a time-saving guide when one is faced with creating multiple profiles across different sites.

Some General Rules

1. When dealing with social media, you may have to leave your political or moral beliefs behind. For some reason, a high percentage of users at the most popular social media outlets are of a liberal or libertarian persuasion and they tend to join groups and vote on stories accordingly.
2. In general, people are a lot more wary about social spam now than they were three years ago. Even legitimate yet misguided marketing efforts can be taken as spam by users.
3. The widespread adoption of the nofollow tag, which tells search engines not to put any value in tagged links, means that marketers need to appeal to communities as a whole instead of simply taking advantage of sites’ domain strength.
4. Buying votes to gain popularity for submissions on social media websites is even more frowned upon than is buying links in order to rank well in search engines. However, search marketers and webmasters ask their friends, acquaintances and business associates for links all the time. They ask total strangers for links via link submission forms and unsolicited emails. Asking for votes in social media is fine – people have the right to decide your content is not to their liking and not to vote for it. However, when someone has bought a link or a vote, there is no social discretion. Money should never change hands in the social media world.
5. Every community is different, even if the same people use a number of different communities. People do not behave the same way at LinkedIn as they do at MySpace; neither do they look for the same content at Del.icio.us as they do whilst browsing on StumbleUpon. Every social media effort has to take the intended audience into account.
6. Even if you have the most compelling content on the Internet, an ugly website, boring Blogspot layout or even a questionable color-scheme can hinder your success with social media. Search engines mightn’t be able to see an ugly background or a slow-loading image, but people can, and they take into account factors like these when deciding whether or not you get their vote.
7. People can be very mean. Social media is a popularity contest of sorts and people love to bring down things that are popular. When your content receives a lot of attention on a prominent website, there will be those who add nasty comments. Consider those comments as part of your success, because rarely do users bother commenting on content that is receiving no attention.
8. Timing can be important. When submitting content to sites like Reddit and Digg, it is not a good idea to do so when it is the middle of the night in the United States. The U.S. is the main source of traffic for sites like this and you will generally notice the best results if your content is gaining votes during the United States’ work day and Europe’s evening.

   Although good content can become popular at any time, a good rule to follow is that intellectual submissions that require a user to think are better off being posted on Monday through Wednesday night or Thursday-day. Less-thought provoking submissions can be posted on Thursday evening, Friday and during the weekend. We once recorded a phenomenal link bait success over a Friday-Saturday time period, but the post was just an interesting picture. Few users are in the mood for political or economic discussion at three in the afternoon on a Friday.

Page Rank is a numeric value given by Google to web pages which represents the importance of web pages on the web. There is a green horizontal bar in Google Toolbar which is known as Page Rank checker. Page Rank value varies from 1 to 10 and the more Page Rank a page has the better trust of visitors on the site. Though some people claim that it’s ridiculous to believe in PR (Page Rank), now it has become a factor to judge the site’s quality and having faith in its brand. So there is no way but to acknowledge the importance of Google PR. Inbound links influence the PR in a big way. When a page gives link to other page, this is generally considered as casting of vote for that page. The more the votes cast for a page, the importance of that page increases. Only the quantity of inbound links does not determine the importance of page, it still depends on the fact that how important those pages are, which cast vote for that page. In other words I can say if a pages gets links from quality pages (obviously PR of those pages are high), then it would have great influence in increment of the PR of that page. So from here we can conclude that for better Page Rank of a page this requires quantitative as well as qualitative inbound links. Page Rank is Google’s way of judging page’s importance. Page’s ranking gets climbing in search results as Page Rank keeps improving.

How to calculate PR of a page?

There is an equation to calculate PR of a page i.e. PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)). Though the equation was published long time back when concept of Page Rank introduced, this still works well. We are not aware what exactly Google is doing while assigning PR to different pages. So we can use this equation to have some sort of idea for calculating Page Rank of our required sites.

Let’s have a look on that equation. Page ‘A’ gets links from page t1…tn. C is the total nos. of outbound links of each page (t1, t2 … tn) that links to page A and d is the damping factor which is equal to 0.85. So the equation can be rewritten as PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)).

This Google PR Checker Tool enables you to calculate the PR of buck of URLs

Press Release Tips

1. Make sure the information is newsworthy.
2. Tell the audience that the information is intended for them and why they should continue to read it.
3. Start with a brief description of the news, then distinguish who announced it, and not the other way around.
4. Ask yourself, “How are people going to relate to this and will they be able to connect?”
5. Make sure the first 10 words of your release are effective, as they are the most important.
6. Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language.
7. Deal with the facts.
8. Provide as much Contact information as possible: Individual to Contact, address, phone, fax, email, Web site address.
9. Make sure you wait until you have something with enough substance to issue a release.
10. Make it as easy as possible for media representatives to do their jobs.

Where do I submit press releases?

There are many services that will accept press releases, but most of them will charge a fee to distribute your news item to journalists and news editors. A few of the better known services are PRWeb Direct , PRNewsWire and MarketWire.
PRWeb Direct , which provides excellent coverage at a very low price. Features include:

• Distribution on the same day
• PR Web and eMediawire Distribution
• Attach graphics and multimedia
• RSS/XML/OPLM/NewsML inclusion
• Yahoo search marketing inclusion
• Google news inclusion
• Yahoo news inclusion
• MSN news inclusion
• Quick statistics
• Up to 10 industry targets
• Free editorial review

PRWeb Direct also offers valuable tips on their site to help you with press release development and submission. The company is one of the oldest online press release distribution agencies around, with 100,000 contacts, industry analysts and freelance journalists in their databases. It’s a great service well worth checking out.

Universal Search is a technique applied by Google where the result coming from various sources. It not only shows you the web pages but also blogs, videos, images and news related to the keyword. With Universal Search, there’s no need to select a separate menu item – the search will return results that encompass many different types of media. For Example, a search for “computer” might bring up not only web pages about computer, but also blog post about it, videos, news article about it.

Universal Search brings several benefits to searchers. A searcher no longer has to specify the media he or she is looking for – one key phrase search will cover everything. And the result for a search will be more comprehensive.

How Can You Leverage Universal Search?

Universal Search requires a wide-range content strategy in addition to simply text.

When using images in your web pages consider adding related keywords to both the name of the image (filename – ie: imagename.jpg) and the alt text

When uploading videos to YouTube and Google video take full advantage of adding a full description about your video.

Keep visitors on your site longer by adding appealing content which compares competitors, offers pricing and gives them something real to take away (whitepapers, data sheets).

Video Optimization Best Practices and Tips

1. Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative – For starters, ensure that your video provides useful and informative information. Videos that demonstrate step by step procedures are great, videos that express an opinion about a specific topic can be useful too. Videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service offering or are general or vague in nature will just confuse your audience. Save the viewer the trouble and don’t just upload a video for the sake of uploading a video.
2. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #1: Give your video a Catchy Title – Video can be used to bring visitors to your site. One way to get users to view your video is to give it a catchy title that contains a related key phrase that is relevant to your product, service or brand.
3. Use Video as a Portal to other Content on Your Site – Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.
4. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #2: Optimize your video for Important Key Phrases – You might want to optimize your video for terms users are likely to be searching for. Tag your video with these terms, consider naming the file name of the video with these terms in mind.
5. Provide Transcripts of your Videos – Good old HTML content is still a favorite with the search engines. If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with onpage copy that can be indexed by the search engines.
6. Keep Your Videos to five minutes or less – there is nothing worse than a boring video that goes on an on. If you have video content that is of long duration, consider breaking it up into smaller pieces and tag each accordingly. Not only does this make for better viewing pleasure, it also keeps the user looking for more.
7. Make use of a Video Sitemap – For video that is native to your own website, make sure that users and search engine spiders can find your video content. The easiest way to do this is through the use of a video sitemap on your site. Use important keywords in the anchor text links to your videos featured on your video sitemap.
8. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #3: Tag Your Videos – tag your videos with key phrases that are reflective of the content.
9. Brand your Video with your Logo – Video is a great tool to generate brand awareness with your prospects. Take advantage of this by incorporating your brand in your videos.
10. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #4: Remember Inbound Linking Factors - Link to videos using important keywords in anchor text.
11. Offer the Option to Embed Your Video – allow other users access to the coding that will allow them to embed your video on their website or their blog. Think viral marketing
12. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #5: Add Descriptive Meta Data - optimize your video for relevant keywords and include a keyword rich description of your video content.
13. Allow Users to Rate your Video – videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favorite and save. You can bet that the search engines will pay attention to this when ranking these videos.
14. Syndicate Your Video – Submit your video to RSS.

The growth of online video has been quite explosive. With this type of growth, the need for online video optimization is a must