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Friday, May 29, 2009

Does Your Blog Have a Twitter Landing Page?

One of the best bit of social media advice I ever received came from Chris Brogan when he said that when you want to decide if a social media tool is for you, observe how someone that is really good at the tool uses it. Right now Twitter is hotter than Memphis in August, and one of the true power users of Twitterville is Laura Fitton, who is known on Twitter as Pistachio.

So it should probably come as no surprise that Laura seems to have literally created the concept of adding a Twitter landing page on your blog. On your Twitter profile page, there's a small area where you can create a bio and link to your blog. But Laura saw an opportunity to improve on the skimpy space that Twitter provides.

Laura added a link on her Twitter page that sends you to a special page on her blog that explains more about who she is, and what she does. I emailed her to ask her why she created this page, and here's her response:

"Here's the thing, when someone clicks a Twitter profile URL, they're probably trying to get just a little bit more information on who is writing the tweets. Chances are, they don't have a bunch of time to go in-depth. So I thought it might be nice to put out a little welcome mat.

I'll probably expand it to fill in some basic info about how I engage with Twitter, like asking the favor of an "@reply hello" so that I can return the follow. For others, they might use the space to tell folks what their "follow back" policy is (it's different for everyone,) really, or other stuff to know about following them. Like, I point out that I tweet an awful lot and that for someone new to Twitter, they might be better off following me in their RSS reader so my frequent tweets don't drown out the stream."

Here's a sneak peek at what Laura's Twitter landing page looks like on her blog:
PistachioTwitterBlogPage.jpg
The page also includes links to posts she has written about Twitter. I absolutely love this idea because Laura is thinking about how her followers on Twitter view her page. She is also already thinking about the future and how she can possibly change the page to make it more useful to her followers in helping her communicate with them.

This goes back to Chris' advice about observing how people that are really good at a particular social tool, use that tool. Laura has found a way to tap into the incredible communication and networking power of Twitter to become a literal superstar in the social media space. She does so by understanding the capabilities of the tool, and utilizing it effectively.

So if you spend any amount of time on Twitter, consider adding your own Twitter landing page to your blog. I will be creating one for my blog soon, and given that Twitter is sending me more and more traffic, it only makes good sense.

BTW if you are still getting your feet wet on Twitter, make sure you follow both Chris Brogan and Laura "Pistachio" Fitton. They are two of the true Twitter experts, and both are sincerely good people to boot!
Saturday, May 23, 2009

Black Hat SEO: Link Farms

Linking farms better known as “Link Farms” is a type of SEO called “Black Hat SEO” . It involves the linking to websites that are not relevant for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity and PR (page rank). This sort of artificial and under the table link building is transparent, and when the search engine crawlers and bots pick it up, they will penalize the website that practices it.

Link farms are considered as a bad linking strategy. To put it in simple terms “it is a form of spamming” as it is trying to manipulate the search engines.

Link farms comprises of a group of websites that are linked and “interlinked” with each other so that the high PR (page rank) pages passes their value onto other websites that is not relevant to the host page. A SEO (Search Engine Optimization) website participating in link farms always contains links to unrelated websites, unlike websites with valid links to relevant sites.

A valid website link is always related to the websites page topic. Valid website links are encouraged for healthy PPC (Pay Per Click) online marketing. Example, if a certain website is devoted to video games that links to the video game developer’s website for review purposes, it is considered as a valid link. Websites affiliated with linking farms does not provide any useful relative information as they always link with other bogus and irrelevant website information.

There are many other Black Hat SEO techniques and most of the search engines are aware of this and it might only help you for a short while. But when found practicing it your website (the one you dearly treasure) will be sandboxed by the search engines.

Golden SEO rule: Keep your SEO techniques ethical.
Thursday, May 21, 2009

What is Black Hat SEO?

Ever wondered exactly what Black Hat SEO means? It is the unethical under the table way of search engine marketing. Think you don’t know about it? I am sure you have at least browsed to a couple of websites practicing these methods.

There are a couple of methods regarding Black Hat SEO and you can find information below regarding a couple of them with a brief description on the Black Hat SEO method.

Keyword Stuffing
It is by repeating keywords on your page in a un user friendly way usually hidden from the viewer. It is an attempt to manipulate your page ranking and search engines takes note of this.

Invisible Text
Exactly as the heading suggests “invisible text”. Example: using a white background with white text. Once more the user can’t see the text because it is hidden and it is focused on search engine bots and crawlers

Cloaking
Search engines knows what is on your website as their spiders crawl your pages periodically and adds them to their index. Cloaking means showing a page to the search engine crawlers and a completely different one to the users browsing the site.

Doorway Pages
A doorway page is a web page built specifically with the intention of ranking well in the search engines without any real valuable content of its own. Doorway pages usually links to the real destination page with valuable content or redirects there.

Selling Page Rank
Selling of text links to advertisers/web masters on a high page rank page that passes the page rank value onto their website.

Buying Expired Domains
There are link spammers that monitors (must be boring) DNS records for domains that will expire soon or that has recently expired. The link spammers then buys the domain and replaces the content and links with their own. Most search engines resets the link data on expired domains.

Link Spamming
Link spamming similar to link farming (see next heading). Link spamming takes advantage of link based ranking algorithms, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) algorithm. It gives and passes a higher page rank (PR) to a website the more other highly (PR) ranked websites links to it.

Link Farming
I wrote an article a while back on why link farming is a bad SEO practice. It involves the linking to websites that are not relevant for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity and PR (page rank) value.

Spam Blogs
Spam blogs better known as “splogs” are similar to link farming. Spam blogs are fake blogs created only for spamming.

Page Hijacking
Page hijacking is achieved by creating a copy of a website which shows the content similar to the original content of the hijacked website to a web crawler but redirects the user to unrelated websites.

Mirror Websites
Mirror websites is the hosting of multiple web sites all with similar content but using different URLs containing keywords in the URL. Most popular search engines gives a higher page rank (PR) to pages where the specific keyword searched for appears in the websites URL.

URL Redirection etc.
The URL Redirection method is used by taking the website viewer to a different page without their intervention. For example using META refresh tags, javascript or another server side method.