TopRank Digital Marketing News

Twitter remains a compelling enigma for online marketers.

In a post to Online Marketing Blog, copywriter Michelle Bowles equated the delicate balance needed in a Twitter Marketing Recipe to that of a guacamole recipe where one false dash could destroy the whole dip.

Michelle’s advice to marketers seeking to receive more value from Twitter can be boiled down to two words:  be valuable. While this may read as very ‘in the box’ advice, the approach you take is what will carry your marketing efforts out of the box.

Personalized search from Google, a new innovation ensuring search results are targeted to you and you alone, is causing shockwaves of uncertainty in regards to how it relates to Search Engine Optimization.

In reality, personalized search has been in play for well over a year, customizing search results for signed-in users based on everything from geography to browsing history. The difference now is that personalized search is in play whether or not users are logged into any Google account.

So what does this mean for SEO programs?

The bottomline answer is, ‘Yes!’ There are dozens of different analogies that can be used to illustrate why that’s so. For purposes of this post, let’s use a fishing analogy.

Say, for example, you drop one baited hook into the water. Were you to drop a similarly baited hook into the water, do you think you would be more or less likely to catch a fish?

Just as more hooks in the water equal more chances to catch a fish, more content online equals more chances to reel in a website visitor — and a better chance of experiencing a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. One of the most efficient ways to create new content is to repurpose old content.

This question has the potential to ruffle the feathers of SEO professionals on either side of the debate: “Are paid links a bad idea?”

‘Paid links’ are exactly what they sound like – paying someone or some company to link to your content.  Like any other practice that involves the word ‘paid’, paid links can straddle the line between legitimate (for example, a paid online directory) or laughably illegitimate (think the linking equivalent of a Nigerian email scam).

So why the prickliness over this question that has been weighed in on by most online marketing and SEO professionals, including our own experts at Online Marketing Blog?

For those of us who grew up reading Mad Magazine, the image above makes the difference between white hat and black hat SEO crystal clear.

For the rest of us, black hat SEO can best be defined as a ‘morally and ethically ambiguous’ business practice.  Black hat SEO practitioners, in an effort to secure high rankings, will break search engine regulations and throw any notion of a positive search experience out the window.

According to last year’s State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati, approximately 346 million people worldwide read blogs.  According to the same report, more than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews and blog about brands they love or hate.  In other words – bloggers have influence about brands and they aren’t afraid to use it.

Bloggers are the world’s connectors that help businesses, products or idea reach a tipping point, or level at which momentum becomes unstoppable.  These connectors are the people who “link us up with the world” and have influential social networks.  Clearly this is an important group for spreading ideas online and connecting end users with your business.

A more accurate question, and corresponding answer, would be:

Q: Can changing my website hurt my search engine rankings?
A:  Yes, it can.

Notice the emphasis.  To accurately answer the original question (see: Title of this post), we need to clarify what we mean by ‘change.’

Common changes to a web site include:

• Changing website design
• Changing content management systems
• Changing domain names
• Changing web hosts

Changing website design and content management systems are the most common things that affect search engine rankings amongst the list of issues above.

Twitter, a popular microblogging site that lets users communicate messages in 140 characters or less, has exploded in popularity. Twitter has become so popular, many companies feel they must have a presence there, if only to stay ahead of the curve.  But is this really the case?

As much as it may seem everyone is on Twitter, this simply isn’t true.  CNET reports that while 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter.

Both gut feelings about the number of Twitter users and statistics detailing exact numbers are fairly irrelevant to the question at hand.  What’s truly important is the percentage of your audience that is on Twitter.

People and companies that start blogs often do so for different reasons ranging from promoting products to opening up channels of communication with customers.

Answering the question of “How you start a blog?” must go beyond the mechanical process of signing up at a service like Wordpress, Blogger.com or Typepad.com.  While each of these services provides step by step instructions, they don’t have any way of providing a blueprint for success in each specific situation. 

From prominent locations including title tags, to less visible positions such as the alt text describing images, there is not one area of a website where keyword insertion will not be beneficial. Per Google, there is even “a little bit” of benefit to inserting keywords into URLs.

Does this “little bit of benefit” necessitate a site-wide overhaul?  Not necessarily.

If you are launching a brand new website, or already have a complete website overhaul planned, it certainly makes sense to build with best SEO practices – from the ground up.