Online community - Wordpress SEO Expert, Peter WM

Spam twits (stop the Twitter spam)

May 2, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Changes are, you’ve a bunch of Twitter followers that aren’t proper followers at all—just a series of fake accounts set up to try to entice you into a spam relationship.

It’s easy to prevent getting spam from these accounts, just don’t follow them. The usual methodology of a spam account is to follow thousands upon thousands of legitimate users, and hope that some of them friend them back.

We’ve all done it, just like most of us did in our early Facebook use. “Oh, look, someone wants to be my friend. Well, I do want to get my number of friends up, because then I appear more popular and might win some non-existent perceived race to have higher numbers on my profile).

We were fools.

So, after deciding to not follow the spammer back, you’re safe, right? Well, not so much. For a start you’re still open to getting direct messages (DMs) from fake accounts. Plus they can still easily mention you (@yourname) which will get both your, and your friends’, attention.

But here’s the real kicker to be aware of. It’s really easy for anyone to see how many fake accounts follow you, and therefore how many actual, engaged folloswers you have.

How big is your sphere of influence, really?

Fake Follow Check will tell you, and anybody else who cares to search fro you, exactly how big it is. And how many fake accounts follow you. If you’ve a large percentage of fake accounts on your follow list, you’ll be perceived as having bought followers, and therefore a bit dubious at best. (Even though I did it myself, to prove a point).

I can see within seconds that @justinbieber, the most followed (and therefore, perceived as the most popular) person on Twitter, has 38,508,154 accounts receiving his tweets. Of which 34% are known fake accounts. and a further 29% are inactive accounts.

So while he does have 14,248,016 legitimate followers, his reported statistic is way off.

Before I start looking up to someone in business, I want to know how successful they are, and how many other people look up to them. This tool really shatters some illusions, but does help me spend my time and money more wisely.

http://fakers.statuspeople.com

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Social integration

March 19, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Social networking is much more than an SEO technique. And while the point of this series is to focus on improving your search engine ranking and visibility, it would be reductionist (and actually really difficult) to talk about social media and it’s relationship to your business without discussing community.

After all, as important as SEO is, its purpose is to build your community of clients, and therefore that tribe of people is the most important thing.

While previous posts in this series focussed on a number of different things you can do, with this topic it all runs together and is a more conceptual dialogue.

Backlinks

At its simplest, the explanation of a backlink is, well, simple. Search engines scan social networks and basically count all the links to articles and content on other sites. If you have 50 links back to one article you wrote, you’ll be seen as having more authority than a site which only gets five.

It’s worth noting that social backlinks are given a fairly low importance by the big search engines, so unsurprisingly a link to your post from an article on The Guardian website carries a lot more gravitas. More on that in the next point.

They are however very useful, because they do offer some weight to your content, and it’s very easy to share content on social media. You’ll notice at the end of all my blog posts is a share feature—I click all those buttons myself to share my content. It’s the easiest way.

Photos/graphics/images

Before you share your article, make sure it has an image as part of it. Facebook and Linkedin both include a graphic from your content next to the link, and links with images get more clicks. Simple.

A word of advice here from personal experience—make sure you have an image in place before you even try to share your content via Facebook once, even if it’s just a test. Facebook caches the content on links, so if you post once without a graphic and then you remember that you really should have included one so you go back and edit your post then share again—Facebook is probably not going to bother looking for any changes. And you’re stuck with a text-only link.

Social networks

You have a bunch of options for places to post to:

Facebook is a no-brainer. Have a page on it, and post your content to it. Make sure the privacy for your posts is “public”, and even if you have very few “likes”, at least the backlinks are there.
Twitter is a no-brainer. It’s short, simple, scanned by Google in near real-time, and again, even if you have very few interactions on that network the links to your content exist.
Linkedin is, for almost every professional business, a no-brainer. It’s where professionals find each other, discuss their industries, and again, if nothing else you’ve got links back to your content.
Blogs should be a no-brainer. Their potential as social networking is often overlooked, but those comments sections are valuable. Read an article, a few of the comments, then post your own reply with a link to your site. Backlinks ahoy. I include online newspapers and the link as blogs for this purpose; they’re very widely read. Here’s a top tip. Once a week, read a really popular blog about your industry. Take 10 minutes to write your own thoughts on the subject, and post that to your blog. Then comment on the industry blog saying, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and here’s my recent blog post that might help enlighten things.” Boom. Your traffic goes up, and you have original content linked to on a popular site—it doesn’t matter that you did it yourself.
Tumblr is a great one too. We’re now in the realm of the networks I call “time-allowing”, because while it’d be nice to hit up every network out there, I also hope you’re busy making money. But this is worth having a presence on, and sharing your ideas through.
Google+ (a.k.a. Google Plus). I use it because funnily enough, Google search knows what’s happening on its own social network. I haven’t made much of setting up my Google+ presence yet simply because there are so many hours in the week. However, I still think this network shows promise for really taking off, and if it does, I want to be established there while other people are playing catch up.
Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. They’re all worth a go, and are essentially social bookmarking services. People share bookmarks, rate them up or down, that kind of thing. The one to be slightly wary of is Reddit though—while it can drive some serious traffic to your site, they have a very close-knit community of users; and if they grab hold of content they don’t like for one reason or another they will tear it to shreds. And with it your ego.

Community

This is really important, because it’s not just backlinks that you want, it’s to have people taking about them, interacting, and ultimately sharing themselves. That in turn brings other people in, and before you know it you have a community of people to sell to. And this is of course the desirable ultimate result.

But people won’t share content unless it’s right in their faces, and of interest to them. And also importantly, of perceived interest to their friends. People don’t share content on social networks because they think it’s awesome, they share it because they think their friends will think it’s awesome. It’s an important distinction.

Part of this community building is for you to interact with your followers and subscribers. If someone looks like they want to get into a debate, then engage with that. If they retweet something you’ve written, thank them for it. Make them feel included and valued by you. Don’t leave other people’s comments hanging out at the tail end of your posts, reply.

Also consider the nature of a community. If all you ever post is backlinks, people will start to overlook your social content. Twitter is a great example, it’s a very social, social network. Because it’s so quick to post to, and users expect a fair quantity of tweets to be made by other users, ideally you’ll post a couple of times a day with something humorous, or clever, or an original inspiring thought, and perhaps post backlinks three times a week. With this sort of ratio you’re building your community and adding weight to your links.

Find opinion leaders

Within any grouping of people, there are those who the rest look up to, and value their opinions. These are the people who naturally settled into a position at the top of the pack, and set the tone for how people interact, what sorts of things they share, but most importantly decide what will be valued by the group. Marketers are always trying to find these people and to get them onside. Have you ever seen those giveaways on Facebook where if you share an advert, and get the most “likes” for it, you win something? Well those campaigns aren’t just about getting brands shared about, they also allow the marketers to see who gets the most likes—and these are the opinion leaders they know to target their advertising towards in future.

My wife is an opinion leader amongst her peers. Whenever she comments on one of my Facebook page’s posts, or shares it with her friends, that post reaches about five times as many people as a normal one.

Opinion leaders make your shares, backlinks, and social communities much more effective. And bear in mind you want to be one of these people yourself. The go-to-person for a section of your industry. Experts and gurus are opinion leaders.

So start acting like one. 🙂

You probably don’t need Microsoft Office

February 4, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

There’s a reason people abbreviate Microsoft to M$—it’s incredibly expensive.

But it gets bought out of habit, because it’s something most computer users have been using for over a decade, and surely the most popular product must be the best, right?

Something that has long annoyed me about the computer industry is the way the stack the deck when it comes to needing the newest thing.

Case in point: the latest version of Office comes out. You head down to the store to buy it, because they have this new fancy “x” on the end of the file extensions and you want to make sure your files will play nicely with most other people.

Whoops, your old operating system won’t work with it. And your computer is too old to run the newest version of Windows, so why not just buy a new computer?

It’s got more processing power than the average simian brain, produces more colours than were previously known to science, and runs faster than a cheetah on heat*.

Or just put this process in reverse—a new computer, with a new OS, needs a new version of Office.

And why can your old computer NOT run something as simple as a word processing program? Simple: they bloat it.

They stick in fancier looking buttons, more help files, extra layers of stuff you’ll never even know about, and the only reason for doing so is to sell you a newer version of their product.

But if they didn’t, the old system would probably last you for years doing just what you need; Internet access, word processing, and email.

Enter OpenOffice (and it’s fork, LibreOffice). It’s an Office suite with everything you need; word processing, spreadsheets, presentations—and it’s free. It’s maintained by a community of skilled volunteers who are dedicated to seeing computing be an open experience, not one based on finance and money making for a few huge companies.

Best of all, it’s files are compatible with Office anyway. And it will open Office files, so you don’t need to recreate anything you already have. It doesn’t need massive amounts of processing power because it’s built to perform a function, rather than sell units.

Increasingly my client’s of mine are sending me files that have been made using OpenOffice, so the uptake is good.

But if you’ve not tried it out already, I highly recommend you do. It’s an example of what online communities can achieve. It’s also very, very awesome.

OpenOffice.org

* I have no idea if Cheetah’s run faster when on heat. Or indeed, if they do experience “heat” like domestic cats. Feel free to let me know!

LinkedIn; a kitten free zone.

November 27, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

I’m the first to admit, I struggled with LinkedIn at first. Not that it’s hard to use or anything, in fact it’s incredibly simple. But I struggled to find its place in my social-media-life.

I’ve had my profile up there for years, and I’d fleshed it out (past jobs, current responsibilities, photo, all the things that seemed important) but I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

All my colleagues and ex-colleagues were on Facebook. LinkedIn let me post messages and share other people’s updates, but so much less then my other social profiles.

Then I started using it regularly; I just made sure I logged in a couple of times a week. Recommended a couple of people. Wrote to someone I could only find on LinkedIn that I hadn’t spoken to for a while.

Before I knew it I became a regular. And the more I used it, the more people found me. Job offers, professional queries, community discussions, they’ve all become an important part of what I do.

I’ve found even people I do communicate with elsewhere interact differently on LinkedIn. We act in the way we want to present ourselves to our workmates, bosses and clients.

The first is to post directly to it. In this case you’re just giving away your content for free to a massive company. They’ll get the SEO authority for that post, not you. And while you might plan to have a link to your site on the bottom of those posts you give them, links coming out of their website are marked as nofollow, which means they don’t get used by Google (or other major search engines) as a way of passing on authority.

Oh and of course some folks repost, posting the content on the social network and their own site. Which simply leads to duplicate content issues.

The second method is to just post a link to the article as it appears on your site. So you’re sharing a link rather than the text. The trouble again is that those links are nofollow, so you won’t get any SEO juice for it.

But social networks are generally quite protective of their own SEO authority, they’re not in the business of passing that on to anyone who posts on their platforms. SO I prefer that second option, just link back to your own site. Forget about social networks for SEO. But it’s still good to interact with people on them, and hopefully those users might follow a link to your own site – then they’re your audience.

One really positive thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn though is it’s easy to accidentally give them your SEO authority. SEO authority is a way of referring to the search engine kudos, or points you might have. There are traditionally two ways most people publish content on LinkedIn.

This is the advantage of LinkedIn. Not only can you build your online community, but you can be sure that your interactions on it are going to be framed in a professional manner, and of a higher quality. To this day I’ve not seen a single photo of a kitten on LinkedIn.

Please don’t be the first.

Opt-in & opt-out, opt-ions. The Data Protection Act and email lists

November 21, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

We spend a lot of time worrying about the Data Protection Act (1998) when marketing here in the UK. It’s outdated and therefore unnecessarily restrictive.

It also means there’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation flying around about it.

When I worked at the American School in London we sought legal advise as early as 2005, and even then we were told it was impossible to uphold the Act to the letter, and the important thing was to demonstrate that we upheld the “spirit” of it! And that was seven years ago.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is a great place to go for useful information on how the Data Protection Act (1998) really impacts us.

Part of building your online community is that you’re going to want to communicate with them (sorry to state the obvious) and that means the law regarding how you can collect their addresses, and how you can use them becomes really important.

The big question has always been opt-in versus opt-out. Do we need users to give us express permission before we contact them, or can we assume (or even just hope) that they’re OK with it?

Here’s the relevant information straight from the Information Commissioner’s Office. To be honest, it’s better than most people think.

Electronic mail marketing

The most important thing to remember is that you can only carry out unsolicited electronic marketing if the person you’re targeting has given you their permission.

However, there is an exception to this rule. Known as the ‘soft opt-in’ it applies if the following conditions are met;

where you’ve obtained a person’s details in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale of a product or service;

where the messages are only marketing similar products or services; and

where the person is given a simple opportunity to refuse marketing when their details are collected, and if they don’t opt out at this point, are given a simple way to do so in future messages.

When you send an electronic marketing message, you must tell the recipient who you are and provide a valid contact address.

The rules on emails don’t apply to emails sent to organisations, though you must still identify yourself and provide an address.

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and Fax Preference Service (FPS) are operated by the Direct Marketing Association, and allow people to register their numbers to opt out of receiving unsolicted calls or faxes. You must not market individuals or organisations who have registered their numbers with the TPS or FPS.

In summary, we recommend that your marketing campaigns are always permission-based and you explain clearly what a person’s details will be used for. Provide a simple way for them to opt out of marketing messages and have a system in place for dealing with complaints.

The difficulty is if you’re starting a mailing list and you already have a database of people you want to put on it. That requires some creative thinking.

via Email & Postal Marketing – Sector Guide for Organisations – ICO.

Let it snow!

November 16, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Well, in truth I’m cold enough here as it is. November 16, and I’m still fighting the urge to turn the heating on in my office.

My hands are so chilly that I’m starting to fear for my typing skilsl thgouhg. 🙂

I spent the past hour putting some snowflakes on one of my private client’s WordPress sites, check it out, they look 3D…and very cool.

It’s a nice little trick that shows people you mean more than just business. It’s not exactly new, but it’s the first time they’ve done it so their online community is in for a treat.

I am going to suggest we replace it with a nice warm fire as we get closer to Yuletide though! And maybe a virtual glass of whiskey to warm our bellies too.

Professional language translation services.

Meta tags and building your online community

November 15, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Part of building your online community is without a doubt, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You want your tribe to be well-positioned, and desirable.

It’s just just new members either, but existing ones want to know they’re a part of something exciting, something that ranks highly. Something prestigious.

The “meta tags” in your site’s code are really important here. There’s a science behind it of course, but it’s something you want an expert like myself to help you with. They’re small pieces of code that search engines read to get a better ides of what your site is about, and what keywords it should look for.

However, here’s one of the tricks of the trade you can use yourself. This tool gives you feedback and advice regarding your meta data, helpfully colour coded for people who don’t want to worry about interpreting too much of it.

My favourite metric it returns is to check how relevant your keywords are to your content. This is an absolute must, and something to look at for all your pages.

It’s a bit technical, but the colour coding helps.

Mind you, so can I.

Meta Tag Analyzer.

You probably don’t need Microsoft Office

Opt-in & opt-out, opt-ions. The Data Protection Act and email lists

Let it snow!

Meta tags and building your online community

Legal

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