Tools, Twitter and a Ton of Opportunity

Often times, you need to discover the right combination of tools in your toolbox to have the internet work for you. In regards to twitter, you can pull more data than you've ever wanted - and easier than ever. I wanted to share some information that I've managed to make use of for a variety of projects, that turned out to be rather helpful.

Through the years, I've wanted to accomplish a few simple things:

Find users on twitter (wherever) on scale, who have websites, and sort by some type of category or topic.Pull this into a spreadsheet, and sort by lots of metrics (klout, da, pa, etc.) to prioritize them.Keep track one way or another of all these folks and start building worthwhile relationships.

And, to my surprise, it's actually easier than ever.

There are hundreds of tools, often times overlapping each other in what they accomplish. I'll outline a few methods to accomplish some steps here, to give you the ability to chose however you want to use it based on your needs. Using these strategies, you can start modifying it a thousand ways and I'm sure you clever SEOs can use this strategy to your advantage ;).

The first thing I did here to identify the audience I wanted to capture, is simply find all the folks who use the same hashtag, and hopefully:

Likes to enter contests, mention brands, engage with brands (or person).Engages in social media, in more than one way. Facebook/G+.Has a website.

The best way one could accomplish this is use a free tool called The Archivist, which you download and allows you to easily search on twitter and export the data quickly into excel. This is what you'll get after using it.

If you are not using a PC, and/or don't want to download programs here is an alternative way to get all the twitter users:

1) Visit http://archivist.visitmix.com/ (web based version)
2) Search for the #hashtag you want to get data for.
3) Highlight the twitter username, select "Scrape Similar" using the Scrape tool and in the XPATH location input: //div/div/div[@class='username']

And....This is what I get:

If you need more help, or are a little lost, here is an amazing article from Justin Briggs on more ways to use the "Scrape Similar" tool.

Some alternative tips to accomplish very similar things:

(TIP 1: FollowerWonk allows you to export searches by twitter bios, however it's paid.)

(TIP 2: If this is something you want to do one-time you can use RowFeeder, which pulls all the URLs for a hashtag and puts it into a GoogleDoc. RowFeeder is paid after one-term, and I prefer to just do this my way.)

If you're feeling really excited you can take your long column of twitter usernames and pull in their Klout score right away. To do this quickly with XPathOnURL using Niels Bosma SEO Tools for Excel all you need to do is:

=XPathOnUrl("http://api.klout.com/1/klout.xml?users="&A2&"&key=[your_api_key]", "//users/user/kscore")

Though this is great, and helpful and we can use VLOOKUP later to pull all this data in - what I really want from this though, is the website that these people have. (If you need help with excel and how it works with Excel, you'll need to read the excel guide from Distilled.)

Again using Niels tool I can find this out:

=XPathOnUrl("http://twitter.com/USERNAME/","//div[@class='url']")

After a quick manual scrub (sort by A-Z, keep the http://, remove the Facebooks/LinkedIns, remove the garbage), you have hundreds URLs, that are worth playing with.

(TIP 3: For help with XPathOnURL or other awesomeness check out this article, from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget.)

I use a quick excel sheet from BusinessHut.com that I modified to include more of Niels metrics (=FacebookLikes, =GooglePlusCount), and Klout Score you get this:

You can make this list as long as you want and sort by whatever metrics matter most to you. I'm sure this will give everybody enough information to get started and have a little fun with some data.

Now that you've got the URLs and contacts, prioritized by vertical/niche, you can start doing some neat stuff with it. You can grow it, sort it, tag it, and figure out who you'd like to engage with and who you don't. You can easily extract the contact information for organizational purposes for all the URLs by inputting them into Citation Lab's Contact Finder or by using a nifty toolset from Buzzstream.

Lastly, use this as a weapon in your toolbelt to grow your community, engage with your audience, and build new high-quality relationships.

There are hundreds of articles on doing outreach correctly, so instead of re-invent the wheel:

View the original article here

Counting to 10 the Google Way

With the end of 2011 in sight, I thought it would be a nice time to reflect on the good old days. Remember the good old days? Back then, men were Real Men, women were Real Women, and SERPs were Real SERPs. Good, decent, God-fearing SERPs had 10 listings – no more, no less. You could count them on your calloused fingers after a hard day’s work, and you knew that all was right with the world.

Then Google got fancy, like some city boy wearing $100 pants and a man-purse. Now, decent folk everywhere are subjected to images, news, videos, and coffee shop listings, when all they want is a good, old-fashioned link. Worse yet, you can’t even count on a SERP to add up to 10. No sir, I don’t like it.

It’s getting harder and harder for SEOs to count rankings the old-fashioned way. While we need to let go of rankings as our only metric, being able to count a SERP reliably and consistently is still an important SEO task, and it seems to be getting tougher every day. I’d like to give a few examples of SERPs that don’t add up to 10, and discuss how to cope with Google’s new math.

Sadly, even the children aren’t safe from Google’s new math. Here’s a Google SERP for “Muppets” (logged out and with the “pws=0” depersonalization parameter added):

Let’s say we had never seen a vertical search result before, and we just counted them the old-fashioned way. These numbers are in red. If we skipped the “Top References” section (since the headline isn’t linked), we’d end up with 13 results for this SERP.

Of course, you and I know that vertical SERPs are different, so we’d be smart enough to skip Showtimes, Videos, Images, and News, right? That count is in orange, and we'd end up with – hold on – only 8 results. So, what’s missing? Well, it looks like the video results do count – even though Google owns YouTube, those are still external links. Using the green counting method, we end up with 10 results, as expected.

These results were depersonalized – what if I add in personalization, and with it, social signals? Surely my friends will save me from this counting conundrum! Sadly, they only add to the mess. On a search for “muppets” while logged in, I get an extra listing:

Although the logged-in SERP varies a bit from the example above, the social listing is an add-on. Even by our SEO-savvy green counting method, it’s #11. Fortunately, you can currently tell these apart by the “...shared this” indicator at the bottom, but expect social results to evolve dramatically over the next year. When counting your SERPs, trust no one.

But wait, it gets weirder. Let’s look at a SERP for good, old-fashioned pizza pie. This one is also depersonalized, but it’s localized to Vero Beach, FL (I discovered this one by accident, based on the location of one of my hosting companies):

Just for comparison, let’s count them the old-fashioned way (in red). If we lump in everything, we get 16 results. Obviously, we’re smarter than that, so we’ll cut out the Images and News results. That count (in orange) is 14, still 4 over our sacred 10.

The savvy SEOs among you will immediately recognize that the top results have addresses next to them – these are integrated Places results (a 7-pack, in this case). Problem solved, right? Let’s remove those Places results and, sure enough, we get (in green) – wait a minute – 7? That’s right, this page has 7 organic results.

Hold on: 2 of those Places results have Google Maps addresses and not their own URLs. Those must not be “real” results. Subtract those 2 from the orange count and we get – tada! – 12. Ok, wait a minute, I’ve got it now. Domino’s and Pizza Hut both have mini site-links – they must actually be organic results. Add those back into the green count, and we’re up to – crap – 9.

This counting thing isn’t turning out to be so easy after all. If we can’t tell which listings are technically “organic” (not Places or vertical) by looking at them, maybe the source code can help us. There are markers in the code, but they’re tough to tease apart. The most telling markers are currently as follows:

Each listing’s link is wrapped in an

tag, but that header doesn’t seem to distinguish between Places and organic results. Even expanded site-links are wrapped in this

tag, so it seems to be purely a design convention.

In each listing’s Google cache link, there’s a parameter called “cd=” which counts up with the listings (cd=1, cd=2, etc.). At first glance, “cd=” isn’t very reliable, because it seems to tag vertical categories on the left-hand navigation as well (“Images”, “Maps”, “Videos”, etc.).

In the example above, though, something interesting happens. The first 3 listings are tagged with cd=1, cd=2, cd=3, but then the next listing to get tagged is the Wikipedia entry, with cd=8. The rest of the listing each have a cd= parameter. This suggests that only the top 3 Places listings (in this example) are being counted the same as regular organic results. Finally, 3 + 7 = 10.

Sorry, but it probably won’t. Google has been experimenting mad-scientist style with the SERPs in 2011, and I only expect that to continue. We’ve got little choice but to adapt and do our best to keep metrics consistent. It’s entirely likely Google could even apply the “infinite scroll” approach used in Google Images to organic listings, killing SERP pagination as we know it.

While it’s fun to dig into the inner workings, the reality is that we need to take a broader view and stop relying only on rankings. Rankings will become tougher to measure and personalization is only going to get more aggressive. If you aren’t already training your clients to look at their organic traffic, unique keywords, organic conversion, and deeper metrics, it’s time to get started.

View the original article here

Google Adsense Section Targeting. Is It Necessary For Blogger Blogspot ?

SEO Focus - The official help support of google adsense said, Google Adsense Section Targeting allows us to tell adsense script about sections of our text and HTML content that we'd like adsense to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to our site's content.

Maybe this could be useful ideas to targeting our adsense, except for google blogger engine. For blogger blogspot, the section targeting is automatically added by the blogger engine.

You can see in the picture below, how blogger automatically add tag in our blog page source:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(name=default)


<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

and

I've been searching any information for this tag, but i couldn't find any results. the official said, we just have to add this tag to our targeted section:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->


<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Yes, it feels weird. because, the only variation of the tag that we could find in the official help site is:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

Ok, for the conclusion, we didn't have to put any section targeting tag to our blogspot blog, because the engine was kind enough to do this automatically for us (thanks god).

But, wait until you read for the bad news i've found. The "auto default tag" will override the "ordinary start tag" that hasn't had any default in its name. this is way we call it "the default". Anything that hasn't got any default value will always refer to the default.

And no matter how you put the <!-- google_ad_section_start --> tag, the adsense will always ignore it, and refers it back to the default start section.

Until then. good luck for targetting your sense.

Meta Tags Addition For Your Blog

There are several possible meta tags that you can add it to your blog, in order to increase the SEO.

As I mentioned earlier, the meta tag is the most important part of an HTML page, beside standard tags such as keywords and description, you can add the following tags in <head> section on your own blog page.

<meta content='index, follow' name='robots'/>
<meta content='id' http-equiv='Content-Language'/>
<meta content='global' name='target'/>
<meta content='global' name='distribution'/>
<meta content='id' name='language'/>
<meta content='id' name='geo.country'/>
<meta content='Indonesia' name='geo.placename'/>
<meta content='ebokalsel1978@gmail.com' name='author'/>
<meta content='Copyright 2011 - Gaptek Update' name='copyright'/>

<meta content='all' name='googlebot'/>
<meta content='all' name='msnbot'/>
<meta content='all' name='Googlebot-Image'/>
<meta content='all' name='Slurp'/>
<meta content='all' name='ZyBorg'/>
<meta content='all' name='Scooter'/>
<meta content='document' name='resource-type'/>
<meta content='id' name='language'/>
<meta content='ID' name='country'/>
<meta content='all' name='audience'/>
<meta content='general' name='rating'/>
<meta content='never' name='expires'/>
<meta content='all' name='spiders'/>

Please customize the content of meta tags that I've marked in red.

Example: 
<meta content='id' name='language'/> for content with Bahasa Indonesia
with <meta content='en' name='language'/> for content with English language.

 

Improve Your SERP with Dynamic Meta Tags

Many people still doubt the function of meta tags to improve the SERP and SEO. They say that this is no longer valid at such a time.

However, in this case, we must return to basic principles of HTML, meta tags etc are part of an HTML page, therefore, be worthwhile to complete it perfectly.

Behind all the debate about the meta tags that I read, one thing that might still be reasonable, and feasible for us to consider is the installation of dynamic meta tag to our blog page.

Why?, Static meta tags cause all the posts in your blog being the same. and this of course will make it difficult, not only for machines but also people who do a search on google.

Small test I did, producing an interesting fact. meta tags dynamically capable of lifting a SERP from page 10 to page 1.

Here's how to install the meta tags dynamically on your own blogspot page:

Open Your Blogspot Dashbord -> Design -> Edit HTML.
Find the <html> tag, insert this code below the <html> tag:


<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<meta content='yourblogMaindescription' name='description'/>
<meta content='yourblogMainkeywords,yourblogMainkeywords2,yourblogMainkeywords3' name='keywords'/>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName + &quot; by &quot; + data:blog.title' name='Description'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName + &quot;, &quot; + data:blog.title' name='Keywords'/>
</b:if>
<meta content='INDEX, FOLLOW' name='ROBOTS'/>
<meta content='your name' name='author'/>


Replace the words that colored red with your own words.
Save it, and you're done

Try doing a search on google. Did you see the difference?


Please leave your comment here.

Enabling Blogspot Archiving Function Wasn't A SEO Bad Things Anymore

You may find lots of advice about the importance of turning off the function of archives in your own blogspot.

The main reason of this advice is about duplicate content. They say that duplicate content is very hated by the Google indexing engine. I want to disprove their claims.

Often I do a copy-paste the url into google search engine. I do this so that my new post identified and indexed faster by Google.

Typically, in 2 attempts of url search, the results can appear in a google search.

But once I turn the archiving , this tricks returned no results in google search engine.

And when I turned it back on again, google search engine instantly found it.

So, how do you think ?, will you follow the advice most of the people, by turning off the function of archives, or you'll going to do an experiment as I did, in order to prove that my words are true ?.

Don't be panic. There is actually a peaceful solution to this problem. Because it is impossible Blogspot would violate the rules of its own creator, google.

Now, I will asks you a question. Have you ever heard about the following tags ?

link rel = 'canonical'

If not, you can read an explanation of these tags here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Briefly, the function of this tag is to explain that the url that included in the tag is the preferred version to be indexed by google search engine.

So, how do we put the code tag in our blogspot page, so that each of the main url will have these tags automatically ?.


Follow these steps:

Go to Edit HTML in your Blogspot Dashboard

look for the code tag <html>

place the following code after the tag <html>, so it will look like:

 <head>
<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>

Save your work, reloads, and prove it by viewing the page source of your post. It should now contains:

<link href='http://my.blogspot.com/yourpost'  

rel='canonical'/>

Well, with this tag code, you can turn back the archive function of your posts, to be indexed faster by search engines google, and simultaneously avoiding the duplicate content.

Welcome to SEO Focus

Hi, this is my first post on this blog.

I hope eventually I can share a lot of valuable information to support the importance of SEO to your blogs.

I am looking forward criticism and suggestions from you, so do not hesitate to give advice, ask questions, comments, and share information on each post.

Thank you for your visit.


EBO

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