Sunday, July 26, 2009

How to go about "Tweeting"

twitter In the social networking world, Twitter is the latest tool to voice your current activities and opinions. However, the benefits of using Twitter extend far beyond personal chit-chat or “tweeting” and can be a useful way to market your business, and to guarantee that your company has a say in the realm of micro-blogging.

Micro-blogging, to clarify, is yet way to communicate online on an immediate basis. For users of Facebook, status updates, or any answer to the question “what are you doing right now?” qualifies as micro-blogging. This social networking development means that valuable snippets of information, such as websites, events and news can be shared constantly to a global Twitter network.

If you have already taken the time out to set up a Twitter profile, chances are you already know the benefits of Twitter-networking. However, if you are struggling to find friends on Twitter, or interesting profiles to follow, here are some helpful hints from Mack Collier, who wrote an article entitled “So How do you Find People on Twitter?” for http://www.searchengineguide.com/.

According to Collier, finding friends on Twitter is as simple as searching for people by name, location or topic, for example “search marketing”, or any other topic that interests you. Collier also suggests using the Twitter Pack's wiki, which allows you to find companies with a presence on Twitter, or Tweetscan. Tweetscan also allows for users to search for any profiles of interest, and a means for others to reply to your Twitter profile.

Collier also suggests that finding people can also be a case of just following your friend’s friends, by keeping track of any conversations between them. Therefore, by being receptive to ongoing conversations in the Twitter-sphere you can enhance your social networking experience, and benefit from your profile's exposure in the micro-blogging sphere.

References:

Collier, M. (2008) “So How Do You Find People on Twitter?” Available at: searchengineguide.com [Accessed 25 March 2009]

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

PageRank Sculpting

Google has changed the way it uses the nofollow attribute. According to Matt Cutts, the new changes will affect the way people have previously used the nofollow attribute. So the question is, does nofollow have any benefit at all?



What is PageRank sculpting?


PageRank sculpting is the attempt to control the link power of one website page to another page of the same website. Pagerank flows from one page to another, with inbound links to the page adding to PR and outbound links 'leaking' it. By structuring the links on your pages, you can have influence on how the PR is spread on your site. This is called PageRank Sculpting.


Many people believed that by using nofollow attributes within internal links on your site, you could push more page rank to a single page and not pass page rank to the other page.

Well, for those of you who were using it, I suggest it's time to change your SEO strategies.
For more information please read Matt Cutts article on changes according to Google:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/