SEO Xcellence Blog

Twitter is my favorite social media platform after blogging. Believe it or not, I actually can talk to every one of the 3,000 plus people following me, although I have limited myself to just over 850 of them. You never know who I’ll talk to or when, but I pride myself on at least trying to talk to people and share things with them and by them.

However, there are people who don’t quite get the nuances of Twitter. There are a lot of people following way more people than I am and have a lot more people following them. But are they effective? Some are, some aren’t, and some are just irritating. Let’s look at 5 mistakes people do on Twitter.

1. They either only post links or chatter all day long. If someone keeps up a diatribe all day long of what they’re doing or just posts links, it often means they’re not trying to communicate with anyone else. Unless you’re just someone I need to follow because you’re giving me exactly what I need to succeed, I’m not following anyone that selfish, and it is selfish, and not too many other people will either. If they do, you can bet they’re either bots or people who aren’t reading what you’re putting out, and are only in it for the numbers.

2. They never respond when someone writes them directly. Twitter sends everyone a notification whenever someone writes them directly. If you don’t respond it means you’re not paying attention, or you’ve possibly turned it off, in which case you’re showing you don’t care. Someone like me will unfollow you as soon as possible; then again, someone like me checks to see if you ever talk to anyone before I even think about following you.

3. You never put out anything original. Many people find that they can get a lot of following by retweeting the content of others; retweet basically means sharing what someone else has already posted with the people that follow them. It’s not a bad strategy unless you never put out anything original, which means someone you write, or ever offer an opinion about anything you share. That often means what you’re doing is automated, and even though some people appreciate it no matter what, others know they’re missing the chance to engage you personally.

4. When you do engage people, or share your thoughts, your language is that of someone who doesn’t know any better. I hate cussing; have never uttered a single word. I’ve gotten used to seeing it here and there online, but some people use bad language as a badge of honor. It’s not, and it makes you look ignorant, even if a few people laugh. If you’re on Twitter for any business purposes you’ll want to restrict that kind of language. Remember, everything you say on Twitter stays on the internet forever, and now is being recorded by the Library of Congress; how’s that for forever?

5. You haven’t set up your bio properly. When you set up a Twitter account you get to create a very short bio. If you’re there for even a little bit of business you need to remember to put a link to your website or blog, and not a shortened or hidden link because that looks suspicious. Some people don’t put a bio at all; that won’t do. Some people try to get cute; if it’s for personal use then by all means, but for business tell people what you do. On my Twitter bio I have a link to one of my blogs as well as my main business site. And you need to put up a picture or an avatar of some kind; no one likes to follow the little egg they give you when you sign up.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2012

I’ve been working on the editing of what I hope ends up being my second “real” book. I’ve got one book on leadership out there, and what you see being advertised on this blog is an ebook on the left and a video seminar on the right.

by Kate Ter Haar via Flickr

My second book will also be leadership related. It’s going to be a compilation of some of my earliest newsletters and early blog posts on the subject. As a sidebar, if you’re interested in checking it out click on newsletter to see some examples and subscribe.

Anyway, I’ve just completed the first edit, and it was pretty tough to do. The reason it was hard is because I started out writing for my business in one fashion, and over time I started to find my voice and my rhythm and started writing much differently. My present writing style developed from trial and error, and I think it’s much more conversational.

This doesn’t mean that every person will like my style, but at least it’s mine. Every person that writes blogs has a certain style, and that’s a good thing. I say that because some years ago I tried writing for what’s known as an “article farm” named Demand Studios, which works hard in trying to put everyone under the same strict guidelines as far as style is concerned. It’s confining and, though they didn’t see it at the time, leads to some very poorly written content. When they took a significant hit with the first Google Panda update they had to reevaluate what they were putting out.

Do you have a style? Is it any good? True, I did say that it’s best if people write in their voice but people also have to evaluate if their voice is, well, good in print. There are some people who can tell a great story but can’t put it down on paper, and the reverse is true as well. I always figure that’s why it takes some people hours to write a blog post whereas I can usually write one in 10 minutes or less. All of us might have ideas that come to us the same way, but we put it down in print differently because of how we process what it is we want to say.

Still, if you do something enough times you’ll develop a style that hopefully you’re comfortable with. My thoughts have always been to never wait for perfection because you’ll never do anything. Get in there, start writing, and let the chips fall where they may. Be brave because fortune favors the brave; now where have I seen that before?
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2012

A sitemap is a file that’s created so that search engines can go through your site via a specific route to find the content that’s there. It helps the search engines to determine what it is you do and helps you get ranked higher.

A sitemap is basically an additional URL, or webpage, that’s added in the background. People can access it if they type the URL in, but no one really wants to do it so it’s really only for the search engines.

These can be difficult to create, but there’s no real need to go through all that trouble. There’s a website called XML-Sitemaps.com that will create just what you need. All you do is put your web address, decide what frequency you want it to look through the site for updates, don’t touch anything else and hit Start and you’re good to go.

It will create a file, or link, which you download to your computer and then upload to your site, and you’re pretty much done. If you’re set up with Google Webmaster Tools you can then go there and add the sitemap link directly.

Since this is a free site it’ll only search for 500 pages and then that’s where it’ll stop. Most webpages aren’t going to get here anyway so it’s not a big deal. If you have a blog, however you’re probably going to want to add the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which will index unlimited pages. This is for WordPress; not sure what other platforms might need. And just so you know, even with this plugin you have to manually add the link to Google Webmaster Tools.

This also puts you on your way to making sure that at least Google is indexing your site, which improves your rankings. There’s no guarantee that Yahoo or Bing will automatically index your site because Google did, so you might have to check their sites to see if you have to add your site there as well.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2012

Back in December I wrote a post here titled Is Google Plus Ready For You? In that post I actually introduced G+, as I tend to call it, and talked about what it was more than anything else.

Now it’s time to talk about whether you or your business should be on it, and why or why not. And the verdict is out; you definitely should have a presence on G+. I’m going to give you 5 reasons why you need to be there, while explaining some other stuff along the way.

1. Because it’s got a large membership. There are over 100 million people on Google Plus now; that’s just phenomenal for a service that’s just about a year old. Frankly, it’s hard to find a reason not to be in a place where there’s that many people and growing.

2. Google Plus allows you to create a business page once you’ve created your personal page. This part is just the same as what’s required of you if you wanted to set up a Facebook business page. At best it gives you another place to highlight your business, and no one discounts how nice external links are for your website. I’ll admit that I haven’t created a business page there yet, but I’ll be getting to it soon enough.

3. You can extend what you want to say there easier. Twitter only allows 140 characters at a time. Facebook ‘limits‘ you to 63,206 characters. If you’re putting out the message, Google’s limit is 100,000 characters. Now, truth be told almost no one wants to read a long message from most of us on Google Plus, but some people have decided to use their status page to write their blog posts and some others are responding to it. See, there’s an audience for everyone.

4. No children allowed. Whereas we all know that there are lots of children on Facebook, even underaged, because their parents don’t know better and help them set up those accounts, Google Plus has none of that so you know you’re always dealing with other adults. The reason is you’re kind of forced to create a Gmail account in some fashion so they can verify your information and supposedly it’s harder to cheat. However, even if some might end up getting on there they’re not going to stay, since probably 99.7% of all the people that actually end up on G+ are promoting a business of some kind.

5. If whatever you put out gets G+’d, you show up higher in search engine results. I’m sure you’ve all seen that G+ thing somewhere on the internet. Well, what that does is gives an endorsement to whatever you’ve clicked on, and if you happen to be connected to people in some fashion that Google can determine, those search links will come up before traditional links will because the assumption is your friend’s endorsements will carry a lot of weight with you. On Google Plus, people are more apt to G+ things you put up, and thus your authority goes up a level; nothing wrong with that.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2012

Whether you have a business website or are trying to make money off the web, invariably just being online offers you the opportunity to make money in some fashion. Many people have an idea of what making money online means to them, but it’s often a limited view, which you’ll see if you visit “make money” websites or blogs. I’m going to give you some of the basic ways that people make money, whether directly or indirectly, and a general idea of how it’s done.

One, you can make money by selling products. This is the easy one that most people think of, as you can sell products you make or products someone else makes.

Two, you can make money by selling services. You find this more often with people that offer coaching, counseling or consulting services.

When you think of this model, you have to think both short term and long term marketing. For instance, if I have a link up it means I’m trying to sell short term services; not necessarily that I’m hoping you’ll only use me once and go away, but these are immediate services that I want to be paid up front for. When you have a business website and you provide services, most probably you’re working on long term services, which doesn’t mean you only offer services that last a lifetime, but are looking to build your authority and presence over time so that you can become known as an expert and thus charge more for your services.

Three, you can make money by accepting advertising. Within this model you can include things like Google Adsense and other pay-per-click (PPC) or pay per subscriber/buyer models. If you have a business website you should think long and hard as to whether you want any type of advertising on your site because there’s the potential of you sending people away. However, if you have other sites like blogs that don’t talk about business, accepting advertising is a great way to build income, but you have to be cautious in how you do it.

Advertising can also take other forms. If you write a blog on a certain subject you’ll often have someone ask if they can pay for a link on an article that pertains to what they do. That’s one of the powers of being a prolific writer; there’s always someone willing to pay for some authority to link back to their site. Being known as a publisher or content curator of original information can pay well.

You need to evaluate your business to determine what your websites goals are. If you’re highlighting your business, then stay away from many forms of advertising. If you’re somewhat flexible, there are lots of options you can explore.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2012

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