GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 16 - May 2011

All jokes aside, while TLD is known to influence local indices since it provides a geo factor to a back link, language within the tweet is probably a bigger influence across a wide range of Google’s indices. So there’s no real need to pay much attention to the TLD of your URL shortener. You should, however, ensure that your chosen shortening service uses 301 redirection. To check this I would recommend using Fiddler (fiddler2.com) to test your short- ened URLs to see which redirection meth- od is being used. Energize your tweets OK, so your shortened URLs are SEO friendly and utilize the correct redirect method. What now? The more influential followers you have and the more places you are listed, the more juice will flow to your profile. This is simply due to the internal link architec- ture of Twitter. Fortunately for us it’s very easy to manipulate without much hassle. The act of following to be followed is the method that most people use, and it can be quite effective, although you should remain mindful of the daily follow threshold. Equally you can buy follows or tweets, which may seem a little spammy, perhaps even a little antisocial, but is effective in getting juice back to you. One such mar- ketplace for this type of spam is micro- workers.com, which makes the whole pro- cess of spamming social media beautiful. If you don’t want to find yourself followed by purely spam accounts or those who re- ally have no interest in what you have to say, then why not wait till Friday and buy yourself 10,000 unique follow Fridays all hash tagged with #ff – you’d effectively be buying the exposure and not the follow, so all your new followers would be genuine opt-in followers. Always hash tag your tweet and force your comments in the heart of a relevant com- munity; they are more likely to result in follows and/or retweets. Don’t worry about not being able to post the desired anchor text. Google loves like diversity. Instead, utilize the 140 charac- ters, proximity text around the link and the hash tag to give Google the clues it requires to work out which keywords to boost the page you’re linking to from your tweets. If you’re hiring microworkers to tweet for you, give them a strict but flexible brief which ensures diversity in the tweets, ensuring that the activity remains natu- ral-looking – remember, spam is spam whether it’s nu skool or old! You’re not just spamming Google indirectly, you’re spamming Twitter now also, so be mind- ful of the fact you’ve now got two inde- pendent anti-spam algorithms working against you – and as such you could ar- gue that you’ve increased your risk expo- sure by the square of the activity, so use your head! Tweet streams on busy hash tags and pro- files are very short-lived and tweets are soon buried, so invest in several power ac- counts covering the topics you’re interest- ing in promoting either directly by Twitter or indirectly via Google. These power ac- counts will enable you to place authority links which you retain total control over and can stay on the page indefinitely. Nobody likes a gob shite! People who talk a lot and don’t listen are rarely popular at parties. Keep this in mind when engaging in these activities: ask questions, make friends, have fun and add value where possible. True social in- teraction will give your power accounts genuine value, get you listed by others and provide the kind of signals which genuinely power up your accounts, giving them the page authority and relevance to genuinely move rankings. Remember . . . Always seek professional advice before hiring an SEO agency or building an in- house team. Picking a keyword is picking a fight. Don’t pick a fight unless you’re sure you can win. If you have any specific questions e-mail me directly at paul@mediaskunkworks.com or follow me on twitter.com/paulreilly or stalk me on foursquare.com/user/paulreilly • • Paul Reilly Paul Reilly has worked in Search Marketing for over 12 years and has earned multiple awards and honors. He is regarded as one of the U.K.’s most influential SEOs, and is the first port of call for almost all iGaming brands. Paul is widely known in the iGaming and SEO industry for his previous work in building the world’s most effective and technologically advanced SEO department. He is the founder of Media Skunk Works, a new-generation service provider which has built its reputation on innovation and optimized methodologies which dissect the traditional agency model. He is currently building a London-based, in- house dream team. 14 Twitter myth dispelled, and how to energize your tweets for SEO