The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO

The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO: "

Ever wonder if all those links that result from people retweeting and sharing content on Twitter give you a boost with search engine optimization?

For a long time no one was sure, because the dreaded nofollow is in use on big social sites to keep those links from being counted as a “vote” for search engine purposes. No matter what, social networking links are still highly useful from a traffic perspective, because they have the power to get new readers to your content.

But in December, Google confirmed that the playing field had changed a little. Here’s what that means for you and your content.

In May, 2010, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google was not using social media links as a signal. And then in December, 2010, he announced equally firmly that they had changed their mind:.

We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking, as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or a creator on twitter or Facebook. […]

This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time, depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being. The one thing I would caution people about is, don’t necessarily say to yourself, “Aha, now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,” just like people used to get a ton of links.

In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers that mean quality, who are the people who are actually not just bots, or some software program or things like that.

What that means is that Google has decided that social media sharing is a smart way to weed the creeps from the good guys.

Right now the effect is still probably small, while the Google teams figure out if social media sharing patterns are a reliable way to uncover the best sites and pages — and leave spam at the bottom of page 10.

(Remember, the first rule of SEO is a lot like the first rule of Copyblogger — don’t try to send users to crappy content.)

Signals

Google uses about 200 “signals” to suggest if a given page is useful or junk.

Right now, links from Twitter or Facebook are still a weak signal. That means that more weight will be given to the usual suspects — how many traditional links you have, the authority of the pages that link to you, what kind of anchor text they use, and your on-page keywords and related copy.

(Check out our free report on SEO copywriting if you want to know more about how this works.)

But those links from social sharing are now a signal that search engines are using — and if it proves a reliable way to get better pages to the top of the SERPs, they’ll turn up the volume on it.

Authority matters

Google and Bing have confirmed that they do take into account the authority of users who tweet links to your site.

If someone who looks, acts, and smells like a real user with actual authority tweets a link to your site, that counts for more than if a newbie (or a bot) does it. Which makes sense — just like if an authoritative site links to you, that counts for more than if a small, new site does.

Does that mean you should suck up to people with lots of Facebook friends and Twitter followers? Not exactly.

It does mean that you’ll want to create content that stands out in the crowd. Because of the nature of social sharing, the best stuff tends to find its way to the top. You may not have 100,000 followers, but someone in your 100 followers knows a bigger fish, and so on and so on.

But your content can only capture the attention of the biggest fish if it’s exceptional. So create the best work you can, always.

What should you do differently?

Probably the worst thing you could do would be to start gaming social networking sites to try and manufacture bigger follower/friend numbers.

Forget lame tricks that you think will make you look bigger than you are. Put that time and energy into creating better content — either by becoming a better writer or by partnering with a fantastic writer who needs what you bring to the equation.

(Your side of the bargain might be a paycheck, or it might be business expertise, or a great sense of graphic design, or killer chocolate-cream-cheese cupcakes. You’ve got to figure that part out on your own.)

If you’ve put off social media because you rely exclusively on SEO to get traffic, you might want to reconsider that.

Not only because social sharing will probably become a stronger signal, but because of the many other benefits that get the right visitors to your site.

That’s why Scribe SEO added Twitter to its link-building tools late last year. (And we’ll include more social media link-building tools in upcoming releases.) As SEO evolves, Scribe evolves.

Social media and SEO were never actually as separate as people think — but they’re becoming more entwined every day, and there’s every reason to think that will continue.

What if Google changes their minds tomorrow?

This is always a good question to keep foremost in your mind when you’re planning your SEO strategy.

Using Twitter or Facebook purely to generate links for SEO is a short-term play that probably isn’t worth your time.

But using Twitter and Facebook to:

• yes, generate links and also …


• get content in front of readers and …


• develop relationships with other content marketers that will earn you high-quality organic links (the old-fashioned kind) and …


• let prospective customers come to know, like and trust you and …


• translate online connections into real-world relationships and …


• do market research by listening for customer problems you might be able to solve …

… well, that’s a smart long-term play that will build your business.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Share your content and copywriting insights with her on twitter.

P.S.

If you find SEO confusing, Scribe SEO was designed to make it simple. It helps you optimize content faster, choose the right keywords, and build quality links — and all with writing that sounds like you, not a robot. Check out Scribe SEO today.

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5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings

5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings: "

Many of you know may know me as an entrepreneur, but my background is actually SEO. Although I follow the rules these days, I am known to have dabbled in the dark arts of SEO. But don’t worry this post isn’t on SEO ethics or if you should be a black or white hat SEO.

From my experiences in both the black and white hat world of SEO, I have learned what you should avoid, if you don’t want your rankings to tank.

Common mistake #1: You can be rich, but not filthy rich… in anchor text

The best way to boost your rankings is to build rich anchor text links. For example, if my startup KISSmetrics wants to rank well for the term “web analytics” I need to get other websites to link to KISSmetrics.

When convincing these sites to link to me, I ideally want them to link with the phrase web analytics as the link text instead of my company name, KISSmetrics.

If more people link to you with the keyword you want to rank for as the anchor text of the link, your rankings will start sky rocketing for that keyword.

But what you may not know is that if you get too many links that are rich in anchor text your rankings will drastically drop after a while. So you have to rotate the anchor text up and ideally make it natural.

In essence having rich anchor text is good, but it can’t be too rich. I usually try to keep my anchor text rich for less than 10% of my links.

Common mistake #2: Don’t ignore internal pages

When you are optimizing your website for search engines, although it’s common for you to optimize the code on all pages of your website, for some reason you tend to forget about building links to your internal pages.

Your homepage is important, but having 100% of your links to your homepage is really unnatural.

I personally try to make sure that 80% of my links, if not more, are going to internal pages. And the best way to do this is to make sure your internal pages have really good content.

What you’ll notice when your internal pages start to get more links, the ranking of your homepage will also start going up. It’s because search engines don’t just try to evaluate where you should rank on a page-by-page basis, but they also look at your website as a whole. This is why sites like About.com and Wikipedia rank for millions of terms.

Common mistake #3: Slow and steady really does win the race

You have heard that phrase millions of times, but do you follow it? I know I always don’t.

Let’s go back to my previous example on the anchor text “web analytics”. Before I start building links, not only do I have to look at how many backward links I already have, but I also need to look at how many links my competitors have.

For example, if my competition on average has over 100,000 links when I only have 1000, my first instinct maybe to build links really fast and catch up. In an ideally world, that would work, but it isn’t the case with Google.

• Don’t try to grow your link count by double or triple each month. Try to stick with a smaller percentage like 5% or 10%.


• Don’t aim to build a ton of links, but instead building relevant links, as they will move your rankings a lot faster.


• Stay away from all page links. Although they can easily be bought, it’s unnatural that someone would link to your website from every page unless you have a blog (blogrolls).

I know doing the things I mentioned above won’t get you to the same link count as your competition, but you will start increasing your rankings drastically.

Don’t fall into the trap of building links quickly. Although your rankings will go up in the short run, it’s hard to maintain your rankings once you get to the top. You’ll start noticing way too many fluctuations compared to if you built relevant links slowly.

Common mistake #4: Content isn’t always king

Have you heard the saying that content is king? It usually is, but if you don’t have enough links coming into your website you won’t get that much traffic.

It’s not about going to oDesk and paying for a million pieces of content and trying to compete with Demand Media. It’s about having a good content to link ratio.

What I mean by this is that search engines analyze how many links you have coming into your website compared to how many links you have. So if you only have 100 links while having a million pieces of content, a lot of those pages won’t get indexed in Google unless you get more sites to link to yours.

Sadly I don’t know the exact ratio of content versus links that you should have, but I just recommend building up your content and links at the same time. If you don’t, your search engine traffic may stall.

Common mistake #5: Title tags and meta descriptions do matter

Out of all the years I have been doing SEO, it seems that you tend to make one mistake over and over. You take title tags and meta description tags for granted.

Now before I got into the simple title tag and meta description optimization techniques I use, I just want to ask you for one favor, don’t take them for granted. I used these simple tactics on sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, and around 30 of the top 100 blogs on the Internet and their traffic went up drastically.

1. Your title tags have to be unique on every page and around 60 characters.


2. Do not include your website name in all of your title tags, as this makes them seem more duplicate. Just include your website name in the title tags for your homepage, about page, contact page, and other generic pages.


3. Your met description tag needs to be unique, represent the content on the page (don’t just stuff it with keywords), and contain around 25 or so words.

Try making those changes to your title tags and meta descriptions. If you already have a good amount of links coming into your website and you have a decent amount of pages, you’ll notice that those changes can double your traffic like it did to TechCrunch. But if you don’t have that much traffic or links coming in, you won’t notice a big impact in your search engine traffic.

Conclusion

There are a lot of SEO tactics that you can use to increase your rankings, but before you pick them, be careful. Although you’ll notice your rankings going up in the short run, in the long run they can start going down. And before you figure it out, it’ll be too late.

Do you know of any other tactics that can crush your rankings?

PS: If you want to learn more on SEO, I highly recommend reading this beginner’s guide.

"

Hacker Tips For Crafting Passwords - Cybersecurity Report

Hacker Tips For Crafting Passwords
BY DAWN LIM 01/31/11 06:14 pm ET
It's a recurring theme among security professionals: users are the weakest links. They're lazy and predictable when it comes to passwords. At a Jan. 30 panel at ShmooCon, the annual hacker conference held in Washington, some hacking pros discussed password security.

On the panel were Rick Redman, who coordinated DefCon's "Crack Me if You Can" contest; Martin Bos, a developer at the penetration-testing firm BackTrack Linux; Robert Imhoff, an analyst at chips provider Atheros Communications; and David Schuetz, a consultant at the mobile security firm Intrepidus Group.

Some takeaways from the panel:

Strict password requirements designed to make systems airtight ("you must have an upper and lower case letter, and a special character") only make them more easily compromised. That's because people respond to password requirements in predictable ways. They tend to capitalize the first letter of their passwords, and then append it with a number or special character at the end. Does that sound familiar?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it may actually be better to have passwords that are so complex you have to write down subtle cues on a piece of paper. Chances of losing your wallets are probably lower than being hacked on a compromised machine or third-party service. Especially if you work in the federal government.
Don't reuse your passwords.
Don't pretend that you aren't reusing the same passwords just by affixing different account names to the end of them. E.g.: "passwordFAIL_gawker," "passwordFAIL_twitter" and "passwordFAIL_gmail."
The technology to crack passwords is getting cheaper and more powerful. Longer passwords need more computational power to crack.
Educating users (through talks and lists like this) is all great, but getting people to actually change their practices is a pipe dream. Regular password audits may be good at calling individual employees out. Angry CFOs breathing down their necks also would work. Of course for maximum security, stop using the Internet.


Hacker Tips For Crafting Passwords - Cybersecurity Report

U.S. GAO - Electronic Records Archive: National Archives Needs to Strengthen Its Capacity to Use Earned Value Techniques to Manage and Oversee Development

U.S. GAO - Electronic Records Archive: National Archives Needs to Strengthen Its Capacity to Use Earned Value Techniques to Manage and Oversee Development

What I took away from @ NY LegalTech Jan 31, 2011

What I took away from @ NY LegalTech Jan 31, 2011

I attended two sessions:
• Implement, Monitor and Update Records Policies: Practical Steps to Success
• Impact of Emerging Content Sources on Corporate Compliance and Risk
Lessons Learned-Both sessions provided helpful resources and insightful discussions. The sessions were a reminder to me of how sound Records Management practices are absolutely essential to success of any organization.
Some particular take a ways:
Proactive Records Management-Outstanding point of consideration!
Begin to prioritize GARP
Learn GARP
Promote GARP
Utilize GARP in Records Management Strategy
Begin to grapple with the issue of managing social networks from a records management standpoint
Be cognizant of the legal issues and risk associated with stored electronic information
Considering the multiple tools that are available. How to assess them and how to make them work best for your environment

Update on Digitization of Vital Records

Update on Digitization of Vital Records

Write PDF Conversion Application With Just 2 Lines of Code

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