I do like the new layout, this is not the issue I have with it. It’s more the fact that I was 17 when I first signed up and I’m pretty sure there are a few images, posts and comments that I’d rather not be reminded of. Now I’m aware that I have the chance to remove all this within the next couple weeks but Facebook is making having an account a chore rather than the social networking opportunity that I signed up for.
The debate around the changes for a lot of people is about privacy and how it’s violating our human rights etc etc etc. I wouldn’t go this far, as when you sign up to a social network surely it is with the aim of sharing information about yourself? Otherwise what would be the point? However, I do believe that there must be a method, which is not such a divulgence of personal events i.e. the break up you’d rather forget that was so publicly displayed on your wall.
The aim of this blog is not actually to moan, it’s more just a big nudge to let you know that if there are certain things you do not want your friends, employer or Mum – who’s just recently discovered Facebook, to see, then you have around two weeks to edit your life.
As Google gets new updates and the algorithm becomes smarter, the job of SEOs has to modify its practices in order to keep up. As my main activity is link building I am always testing new ways to deliver great results and to anticipate trends. I strongly believe that social mentions and back links have an equal weight for rankings, saying that, I have compiled these suggestions to get the most out of your link building campaigns:
- When you are looking to publish a guest post for your clients or get a link, avoid evaluating your host with the old criteria: Page Rank, DA, MozRank. Nowadays it is more important if your contact has a good amount of followers and fans because you need to get tweets and likes out from your guest blogging activities.
- Make a good use of Social Bookmarking tools and open themed accounts for every industry you are working for. After that remember to bookmark all your links and articles out there. If you want to be more efficient organise a community of people that bookmark your content, that will make your content attractive for the search engine and it will be indexed quickly with good social signals.
- When you are doing guest blogging, maximise your effort. Tweet about a new post from the client social media account; ask the blogger to do the same and social bookmark everything.
- Establish online relationships and start multiple collaborations. I have a great new idea, which is to get in touch students with businesses they are interested to work for. This way you can really set up new ways of producing great content for free.
- As Google+ is definitely supporting the creation of personas (now you can connect articles to authors via G+) every business should choose a public speaker that can produce useful content for the web. It is something that was already in the sight as some companies started to use this strategy on Twitter for customer service.
If you want to talk about link building in 2012, drop me a tweet @tugagency
“You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson confirmed. She added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”
The new ad placement could lay the foundation for Facebook to finally begin advertising in mobile.
Starting today for people who enter an English search term into Google.com logged into their Google account, they will see results featuring posts and content from their wider Google+ network alongside worldwide search results. Below is an example of what happened when Neil searched for “Tug” while logged into his Google account.
You can see the top result indicates that there are 400 personal results in his Google+ network. Then the second and third results are personalised with a figurative logo in blue next them to indicate this is the case.
Image searches also fall under this category and the name of the friend who has posted this image appears in the thumbnail link, showing the name of the person who posted the picture to your network.
You can switch between your personal search results integrated with worldwide results and pure worldwide results using two new buttons that appear on the right hand side of the search bar.
This means you can filter out the social feed and opt to use natural Google search at the touch of a button.
Search plus Your World will impact the way Google users search for content online and highlights a sea-change in the importance of social media when considering your SEO strategy.
To talk to Tug about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
Or follow us on Twitter @tugagency
Drop me a tweet @Tugagency if you have any questions!
Firstly, I would recommend you to use these suggestions carefully as you shouldn’t change your editorial style in order to be SEO friendly. Let’s get straight to the practice and see how a mom blog can meet Google standards:
1) Look at what people search with Google Keywords tool. In order to reach these users you should include some of these terms in the title tags, alt tag of images and/or in the first 100 characters of the post.
2) If you work with WordPress, our suggested platform, install any SEO pack in order to personalise meta descriptions and title tags with the keywords that people search for and that describe your article. Google XML sitemap is another great plug-in that creates a map of your site and send it to the search engine. If you don’t use WordPress, check online on how to optimize the title tag and the description of your posts and how to submit a sitemap to Google.
3) Create social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and bookmarking (Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg) profiles for your blogs and share your content online. For Twitter remember to include related hash tags while for Facebook and G+ work include images. Sometimes ask to share your article if you feel that it can be of interest for the community. In 2012 social mentions are going to be an important ranking factor.
4) Add your blog to online free directories and write guest blogs with a link back to your one. The more links which are pointing back to you, the higher your ranking will be. Another good technique is to answer questions (Yahoo Answer and Quora) and comment other posts with useful information.
5) This is a great infograph on blog copywriting that explains how you can improve the readability of your text. I would add that you should link to other similar articles in your site if there are any.
Share this post to help build the great British mum blogger community!
In order to spread the virus at a higher pace it is suspected that Ramnit is using stolen credentials to hack into accounts and subsequently send malicious links to friends.
Social networks are like a hub of personal information and for this reason they are especially appealing to viruses.
“It appears that sophisticated hackers are now experimenting with replacing the old-school email worms with more up-to-date social network worms. As demonstrated by the 45,000 compromised Facebook subscribers, the viral power of social networks can be manipulated to cause considerable damage to individuals and institutions when it is in the wrong hands,” said Security firm Seculert.
Seculert has estimated that between September and December 2011 over 800,000 machines were infected with Ramnit. The problem is that it is not always visible that Ramnit has passed through your computer. It is stealing passwords with no announcement of its presence. The advice given is to run your anti-virus software and hope for the best!
Facebook Ireland was given responsibility for all non-US and Canadian data back in September 2010 hence raising the significance of these findings. Facebook now has six months to consider and implement these new changes.
Facebook apparently welcomed the review, saying: “We are pleased that the report demonstrates how Facebook adheres to European data protection principles and complies with Irish law.
“Of course, the report highlights some areas where we can improve and reach best practice.”
The report suggested widespread changes, including:
- a mechanism for users to make informed choices about how their information is used and shared on the site, including in relation to third party apps
- increased transparency and controls over how personal data is used for advertising purposes
- transparency and control for users via the provision of all personal data held to them on request and as part of their everyday interaction with the site
A second formal review will be carried out in July to check up on the progress.
It was snowing this morning! Did you see that? Outside everything is dedicated to Christmas – the lights, the shops, the markets and now even a little bit of snow. So I decided not to do anything related to Christmas, but pull together fun stuff that is going on in the World Wide Web.
This time I wanted to look at the things that are really popular at the moment in the Twitter environment, when people are trying to have fun:
- 9GAG is a comedy website set in Hong Kong and hosted in the United Stated. It launched in 2008 and currently is very popular amongst people. A lot of people are sharing the images they find in 9GAG via Twitter. The site is best known for recurring use of internet memes. It is among the 500 most visited websites ranking 468 place globally. According to alexa.com the sites users tend to be under the age of 35 and they tend to be childless. Visitors to this site spend approximately 64 seconds on each pageview and a total of 13 minutes on the site during each visit. I must admit it is pretty addictive sometimes.
- What internet memes do you pass over? I personally use hashtags at the moment, although I’m keeping my options open. So internet memes are basically a concept that spreads via the internet. While doing this research, I found out that the earliest usage of meme in general is in the book created by Richard Dawkins called “The Selfish Gene” – it was published in 1976. Internet meme is an idea that is propagated and spreads through the internet. A meme can be a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag or just a word or phrase. One of the most popular internet memes are misspellings, such as the word “more” as “moar” or “the” as “teh” simply because misspelling is very common. Internet memes spread from person to person through various places like blogs, news sources and social networks, so no wonder Twitter is full with them. Academically, researchers model how the memes evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web, while commercially they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.
- Rage comic is an extremely popular internet meme at the moment. It is a comic made from a stock set characters, commonly known as rage faces and centre on the rage guy. It started on 4chan in 2008 and in 2009 the meme experienced an upsurge in popularity. In 2010 shirts with the rage face started to appear and were sold by Hot Topic. The comic usually focus on small moments in daily life from the perspective of a protagonist the reader can identify with. The face seems a bit creepy to me, though.
- And a little discovery for the ending. The most popular Twitter hashtags in 2011 were:
- #egypt
- #tigerblood
- #threewordstoliveby
- #idontunderstandwhy
- #japan
- #improudtosay
- #superbowl
When Facebook started to decrease its market share in the States, some business analysts thought that more specialized networks would have space to grow. Since then other sites have started seeking my attention and begun to adventure into the crowded field of social networking sites.
On the 30th November 2011, Wikipedia lists 204 social networks currently providing active spaces for conversations, profiles and great organization services.
Here’s a selection of my favourites:
1) DeviantArt
It aggregates illustrators, photographers, painters, computer artists that share their works online.
2) TravBuddy
Community of travellers that share their experiences writing reviews about locations, attractions and special places that have visited.
3) SoundCloud
Looking for music producers and bands? This is the best place to discover the next coming star in the music world, it is a great source for independent stuff and a great marketing tool for every musician
4) Habbo
It started in 2003 and it has an amazing 3D pixel graphic design. It looks like an old school game where you can use an avatar to play a second life. Good luck with it!
5) Asmallworld
This unites the European jet set and the social elite worldwide. Many marketers use this for B2B leads. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. Asmallworld offers memberships by invitations only
Any question or more on this, follow me on Twitter: @carlopandian
These are 5 quick wins link building techniques to uplift your personal website that you want to show online.
First of all, decide which one you want to build links for (an example: about.me/johnmccain) and create these 5 accounts:
1) Twitter
you must include in the profiles settings a small description and your personal website url. Remember to tweet when you upload new information with a link to it. If you want to be shown near a particular term, for example your profession, include related hash tags and keywords.
2) LinkedIn
There’s a section in the profile where you are allowed to publish three sites. Select the option “Other”, write your full name as the anchor text pointing to your target.
3) Facebook
Select “edit my profile”, then “contact information”. There’s a section where you can insert your link.
4) WhoHub.com
It is a platform to release interviews about your interests or profession and allows you to add do-follow links (include just one). This is a great new resource because you can stuff a page with keywords that are connected to your profession.
5) Google+
In the section “other profiles” type your personal website first and then your other profiles below.
If you think you need more to reach a reasonable ranking, you can participate in bloggers’ conversations. In fact you can leave comments on posts using your full name as anchor text and your personal site. If you want to reach a better visibility you can write an article and sign them. You can find opportunities in your niche through looking at My Blog Guest forum.
These are all simple and easy techniques, however they can only get you so far, for example if you are called James Dean or Michael Smith, you will need to spend much more time and money to reach top positions.
