Dear Readers

This month's feature article - SMX Sydney Twitter Tips and Etiquette, actually covers the Twitter session given by Darren Rowse from ProBlogger at SMX Sydney.  We've also got some great Q and A's for you, including advice on how to target different demographics via search engines, the lowdown on how to kick off a career in the search industry and some ideas on how involved your clients should be in the SEO copywriting process.

By Kalena Jordan 

Coverage of the Twitter Tips & Etiquette session by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger at SMX Sydney 2009.

Darren starts by stating that 6 million tweets a day are going out on Twitter at the moment. He began as a skeptic towards Twitter and is now an addict [sounds familiar!].

Benefits of Twitter for Darren:

• Networking and collaboration
• Research - Darren received 50 responses in 2 mins and 100 responses in 10 minutes to a research question. Therefore he says the potential to capture data from an audience is incredible. He gave an example of a poll he ran on Twtpoll.com "Have you ever tweeted from the toilet?" 59% of respondents hadn't but scarily 41% said they had!
• Branding
• Driving traffic - Twitter is the #3 referrer to Darren's blogs
• Water cooler
• Humanizer
• Deepens relationships
• SEO

The Twitter Opportunity:

• Twitter is fastest growing community site on web
• Twitter has had 1,382% growth in the 12 months to Feb 09
• The largest user group on Twitter is 35-49 year olds

Twitter has tweaked their title tags in past week or so. News agencies are talking about Twitter all the time these days.

Twitter Usage by Top 10 Countries:

United States = 47.9%
Germany = 9.2%
United Kingdom = 6.8%
India = 5.9%
China = 2.9%
Australia = 2.9%
Canada = 2.7%
South Africa = 2.0%
Japan = 1.6%
Netherlands = 1.2%

Twitter is the 85th most popular site in Australia at the moment but the trend is increasing.

Business are using Twitter too. They're letting employees tweet or even making them do so. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are that it makes the business seem more personal and more approachable. The cons include the risk of fallout if the employee managing the Twitter account leaves.

Businesses are also using Twitter as an Internal communications tool, for promoting internal news, mentoring, project status updates, social interactions etc. Similar tools for this include Yammer and Present.ly

We're seeing more businesses use Twitter as a monitoring reputation management tool as well - watching keywords, tracking brands, reputation management and damage control. Twitter usage by businesses deepens and reinforce relationships and it's also an opportunity for sales and marketing. Savvy businesses are using Twitter alerts to track mentions of their brands etc. Now some businesses are monitoring their target keywords to see who's talking about them and then sending them suggestions and tweets that are targeted directly to their interests etc.

Tips for businesses on Twitter (via @pistachio):

• use manners
• dress nicely
• be a good conversationalist

Darren recommends creating a purpose-built Twitter landing page that introduces you and your brand to Twitter followers. Don't link to your home page, he says.

Before You Start on Twitter:

• Reserve your Twitter accounts NOW
• Learn the culture and language
• Find a tour guide who speaks "twitterese"
• Identify key players
• Listen/ monitor
• Identify objectives

Smart companies have multiple channels on Twitter, says Darren e.g. Dell has 34 Twitter accounts

Tips for Finding Followers:

• Provide value, solve problems, fill needs
• Leverage other profiles and networks
• Ask questions
• Be conversational
• Be active (especially at peak times)
• Offer incentives

Darren uses some automated Twitter tools to auto-tweet while he's asleep to reach his US audience, but is careful how he uses these. As an example of incentive offering on Twitter, Sitepoint offered a free ebook to anyone who followed them on Twitter and raised 20,000 followers in a short period.

Other Tips:

• Use direct messaging where possible (can damage your brand otherwise)
• Re-frame questions for your followers instead of the one word answer - adds value to your followers, brings everyone into the conversation
• Be playful
• Work with rhythms of your followers
• Be careful of automated tweets because some people unfollow those who use automated "thanks for following" type messages
• Be a thought leader
• Leave room in your tweets for ReTweeting by others (room to add your @handle and "RT")

Recommended Twitter Tools:

• TweetDeck (Twitter platform)
• CoTweet - (Twitter platform)
• Bit.ly (URL shortener)
• Monitter (monitoring service)
• Twends (monitoring service)
• Twitter Search (Twitter's internal search service)
• TwitterHawk (monitoring service)

Good Use of Twitter by Aussie Businesses:

- BigPond

- Commonwealth Bank

- Dominos Pizza

- EMI

- Fairfax Digital

- Jetstar

- RioTinto

- VirginBlue

- Vodafone

Darren says that Twitter are open to being approached if someone is squatting your brandname as a Twitter account.  See Darren's Twitter blog Twi Tip for more Twitter tips.

[Added by Kalena: If you have an issue with spam on Twitter, direct message @spam with the name of the account doing the spamming. If you have an issue with impersonation, TOS violations, TM violations, etc. on Twitter, file a ticket rather than messaging @spam. You can file a ticket by visiting help.twitter.com and clicking on "submit a request".]

* Photo courtesy of Darren Rowse on ProBlogger.net

                                                             Eleanor Roosevelt

 

I never read banner ads. That's why I was surprised to find myself clicking on a banner the other day. The ad intrigued me because it offered to fulfill a pressing need I had.

Over the years, I had developed what I thought was a fairly slick proposal template for my search engine optimization business. But still the document lacked an edge. I knew I had lost a couple of recent pitches to my competitors and I wondered if there was something about their proposals that I was missing in mine. 

 

The banner ad from Proposal Kit offered a solution to my problem. It advertised "Turn-key contract, estimating and proposal kits for today's Internet professional". That's exactly what I was looking for, so I clicked on the banner ad, fully expecting to find some ultra-hyped, over-rated, disappointing backyard software. Boy was I wrong!

 

Proposal Kit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.
 

Let Proposal Kit improve your professional image and help you close that sale.

You will ONLY receive this newsletter if:
 
1) You have subscribed directly at our site via our email sign-up form.
 
2) You have downloaded our free SEO lesson or registered for a free login from Search Engine College.
 
3) You have submitted an inquiry via our online contact form and checked "yes" next to the newsletter option.
 
4) You have sent me a question to be answered in the Ask Kalena blog and checked "yes" next to the newsletter option.

5) You are a student at Search Engine College.
 

All of these methods require you to verify your subscription. If you have been subscribed in error or don't wish to receive any more of our newsletters, simply press the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of this page.
 
Have a great day! 

Hi Kalena...   

You've said in your SEO 101 Course to look into sites within the same industry when building links.  I have been able to talk my supervisor into letting me "play" with our company website and give her some feedback with the knowledge I have already.

One of the things I have found is a lot of broken links on our website so they are going to fix those but some of those partners will not reciprocate and post our website link on their site.  Do you find this quite common?

Also, some of the professional medical organizations we belong to will also not post our website link as they say it is against their rules.  If we just use general business directories, how do we know we're targeting the demographics we want?  What do you suggest?

Hi Louisa

When link building, it's not the number of links that is important, but the quality of those links. Reciprocal links are not your ultimate goal because one-way links are generally more valuable.

Unless there is a very popular site in your niche that won't give you a link unless you link back, in my opinion you shouldn't seek out reciprocal links and should instead be aiming for one-way incoming links to your site.

So for example, a one-way link from a medical related category on the JoeAnt Directory back to your site is generally worth much more in the eyes of Google than say 10 links from poorly trafficked sites in your industry or reciprocal links from low quality link farms. That's because business directories such as JoeAnt, Business.com, Gimpsy and similar directories have a large audience and a long history so they have more *trust rank* in the eyes of Google.

So what you should be doing is seeking out links from sites with a similar medical theme, medical categories on trusted business directories and related sites that have a lot of traffic and preferably a high Google PageRank. One good method is to look at your major competitors and check their backlinks in Google to see what sites are linking to them and then approach those sites to see if they'll link to you too. But remember to verify if those sites have a decent Google PageRank and suitable audience before pursuing a link.

Check these link building resources for more info:

• How to set up a link building campaign for a web site or a blog
• How to evaluate a directory for link building
• Link building articles

Hope this helps!

 
Kalena

Also, isn't is best practice to delete keywords from Ad Groups that have no impressions/clicks for 3 months? Thanks you!

Hi Staci

There's no hard and fast rule about the limit of AdGroups each Google AdWords campaign should have, but there is a knack to good account organization. You need to set up your campaigns so they are manageable and logical.

For example, set up a new campaign for each specific geographic market you wish to target, or perhaps for each product line you are promoting. The key is to create as many AdGroups as you need in order to silo each of your keyword themes into their own AdGroup, for example blue socks, red socks, wool socks, nylon socks etc.

You need each of these in their own AdGroup so that you can create ads that are specifically targeted to each theme and use the specific keywords and phrases within the ad headline and body. If it makes sense to have 50 AdGroups in a single campaign for this purpose, then so be it.

Regarding the deletion of keywords, if they aren't attracting any impressions then yes, delete them. But if they're getting impressions and no clicks, I would tweak the ads for a month or two before deleting them as the problem may be that the ads aren't convincing enough.

When I kick off a new PPC campaign, I create a large number of creatives and then If they don't attract conversions within 2 months, I delete the non-performing ads and gradually pause any that have a 2 percent or lower conversion rate.

I assume they would at least typically have review authority to approve what could be considered a first impression of their business? I'm curious how any past experiences you've had would have panned out.

Thanks

Dear Dan

I typically ask the client to provide several pages of copy - either that which is already used online or perhaps in offline brochures etc. and then I rework that copy into several logical web pages.

Copy for the home page starts with the most important target keywords and expands from there, using the most appropriate parts of the copy that was provided by the client. Then I usually have a professional copywriter re-write the copy, integrating the target keywords seamlessly, while implementing call-to-actions and guiding the site visitors to the goal the client wants them to achieve (e.g. sign up, purchase, bookmark etc).

Sometimes I hit a brick wall with the marketing staff of larger clients or sometimes with their advertising agencies during the copywriting stage, but once they're educated about the process and the end-goal, they generally allow me to have final say over the copy content.

You have to find a happy medium between searchability and convincing copy, but you also have to satisfy a range of stakeholders. It's always a balancing act! No matter what, don't be tempted to hijack the project. Make sure your client feels an integral part of the journey.