Social Media Basics

The majority of you will already be familiar with many of the social media websites out there. Almost everyone is now a member of Facebook, or if you're a professional, LinkedIn, but these are more than likely on a personal social basis. So what about for business?

Well, in my opinion, it's becoming more and more important to create a social media presence online, and it's only going to get bigger in 2009. It's also very important to not become spammy. Social media can be very time consuming, so for beginners, it's often better to concentrate on just a few sites, rather than trying to cover all the bases and signing up for them all. Create a Facebook page for your business/website and choose another.

It's important to point out, that almost all of the social media sites have the nofollow attribute attached to the links, so in terms of building your PageRank, this will not do much good (don't worry too much about PageRank) - it's rather an organic way of getting people to visit your website.

One of the best ways to gain popularity or followers on sites such as Twitter or in your Facebook page is to get in contact with your existing customers or if you have a mailing list, send a mail asking your clients to join your group or become a fan/follower. Then post interesting things on your pages, and always try and reply to anyone who replies as quickly as possible. One way is to perhaps say something that will strike up a lot of attention - try challenging a widely held belief (as long as you can back it up) or announcing some free giveaway on your site or something like that. Top 10 lists are also a good hook, so think about your market and make up a couple of top 10 lists. You can also set up sites like Twitter to co-incide with your new blog posts if you have a blog for example.

For more information about Social Media and other SEO strategies in Barcelona please contact me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about your site and

Google Just Made it Easier to Spy on Your Friends

A cool new mobile application was launched today from Google, called Latitude.

The idea is that if you have a mobile device with Internet or wi-fi, and all your friends and family also download the application, you can see where they are! That's James Bond stuff, right?! Well, not quite. Google is obviously very privacy conscious so you can "lie" about your location if you need to be somewhere but sneak off somewhere else.

The launch describes it as being able to "see if your spouse is stuck in traffic" or if the flight of a loved one got there on time, blah blah...but I love this bit

"You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see. For instance, let's say you are in Rome. Instead of having your approximate location detected and shared automatically, you can manually set your location for elsewhere — perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls . Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis. So for each person, you can choose to share your best available location or your city-level location, or you can hide."

So you can play hide and seek with your mates, by telling them that you're in various different locations - even a different country! I can see many a rich daddy installing the device on their kids' iphones as you read this, so as to keep track of their runaway teenagers - only to never know that when they've put Las Vegas as the destination to "fool daddy" they really are there!!

Of course the real winners here are Google who will be filling your google maps screen with up-to-the-second google ads, just to remind you that Pizza Hut has got a 2 for 1 on at the moment, and...hey, look at that, it looks like one of your mates is right around the corner, too!

For SEO services in Barcelona please contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about your site.

Kids to Design new Google Logo

Ok, well, the post title is a little misleading, but those community-loving-über-millionaires at Google have got the kids at heart really. Hmmm....

Whilst searching today, I came accross this link which is open to US kids as a competition offering scholarships to college, etc. The idea is to re-design the google logo - kid of - and then you get to feature on the site for a day, or something like that anyway.

You may have noticed that Google sometimes changes the logo on holidays (Saint Patrick's Day, Christmas, Easter, etc.) so this is a cool way of getting some free material from kids!

No, I'm not really being critical, and it's a great move by Google (even if they do feel the need to put cheesy videos to accompany the information!), and encouraging kids into further education is a must. I'm just a little pissed off with them today, as I had a 50 Euros Adwords voucher deemed "out of date" with no explanation. Grrrr...

Contact me for SEO Training in Barcelona or if you need your Pay Per Click campaigns tweaking, I also offer AdWords managment and training, too.

Google cocks up SERPS

Today was a bit weird. Whilst searching for things using Google, all the websites were flagged as potentially harmful to your computer - even Google's itself.

I thought it was just me at first, but then the BBC website also reported on it later on in the day. Here's Google's explanation:

"What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

I know it's not a hugely news-worthy story, and maybe a bit off topic on this blog, but it did happen to me, and I was a bit stumped. I suppose it just goes to show that even the big guys have "human errors" sometimes, too!

Like what you're reading? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for ways I can improve your conversion rate and maintain those website visitors as real customers, too.

Website Optimisation - Eye Metrics

As I've previously mentioned, 2009 is going to change the way Search Engines provide their results.

Some things however, never change. You may have heard many times of the importance of page navigation, but what does this actually mean?

Page Navigation

Page Navigation or good page navigation, in a nutshell, means that visitors to your site should not have to move around and find the right places to click links to get to where they want to go. Once upon a time, all links used to be blue (because most browsers are programmed to see links as blue by default), so it was easy to see which parts of a website could lead you to other pages. Certain research suggests that this is still a great way to go - but, more and more, modern websites choose different methods of guiding their visitors to where they want to go. This could be call to action buttons, clickable images, offer buttons ("get 25% off now", etc.)



There is one thing however, that hasn't changed in at least the last 10 years, just that recently technology has been able to explain and justify why. This is what people look at when they first see a page.

Eye Metrics

The funny image above is actually a snapshot of a SERP from Google but with clever eye metrics information super-imposed on top. This basically shows where exactly people looked on this page and for how long (the colours are self-explanatory) and works the same for almost any website - regardless of the content. Website users (normal people like you and I), have been conditioned to view pages in a certain way. The same way that when you pick up a newspaper, you scan the pages and don't necessarily read the whole newspaper as if it were a book. This same principle applies to a website, with a remarkably high percentage of users focusing on the top left hand side of the page, then the title of the page and then back to the navigation bar which is almost always at the left, just below the first thing the user saw (maybe the logo, for example). No surprises, you might say, that's what I do. OK, so how can this information help me on my website?

Well, first of all, make sure your most important information is at the top of your page. Make this your unique selling point. This sounds obvious, but there are many websites out there that give an introduction to their company, or a history lesson with regards their sector.


Above the fold.

Note that expression. Most successful websites have a single column navigation, because this controls the way that your user views your site. The same as a sales pitch decides when and where to drop the sales techniques, a single column web structure is easier to control in terms of what you want your visitors to see.

However, many visitors will not scroll down below the first part of your site which appears in their browser, and will click out or hit the back button. Imagine your site as one long piece of paper, but each time the screen reaches the end of the browser, then that is a "fold". You need to keep all of the important information "above the fold", so you ensure that your website visitor is seeing your unique selling point as soon as they hit the page.

This post goes hand in hand with some of my other recent posts regarding How to keep visitors on your website.

Like what you're reading? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for ways I can improve your conversion rate and maintain those website visitors as real customers, too.

Twitter for SEO?

There's no doubting that Twitter is huge, and is going to get even bigger in 2009. When recent troubles broke out in Gaza, CNN used Live Twitter reports from people inside Gaza to update their newsreel, and the recent plane that crashed in the Hudson river in New York had another Twitterer sending minute by minute reports of the rescue mission. Micro blogging sounded like it would never work, but it's working incredibly well.

However if you ask me, Twitter for SEO is a bit of a no-goer. At least in my experience so far for my site and clients. Part of the reason is that it's a bit like Facebook, but quicker, and Facebook is used primarily for social interaction - keeping up with friends, checking out thier photos, etc. There are many company pages you can become "fans" of, but those pages with the most fans that aren't people, tend to be funny niches like comedians, or films, etc. Twitter is much quicker, even if I do seem to find error pages almost all the time I'm on there?!

With regards SEO, you can drop links (via tools such as tinyurl) all day long if you like, and build up your home page to gain a decent PR (Page Rank). Then you also have a url on your home page which would technically be a great 1 way, high PR link.

There's just one problem. All the links are nofollow. So for all the hard work and "original content" that you're making, same as your blog, there's no SEO benefit. I can see twitter being highly addictive, and there are some great add-ons which make it possible to become even more addictive, but I think time spent on Twitter with regards link-juice is a waste.

Where I think Twitter would really work, would be branding and gaining real customers, if you have something really interesting to say about your company. If you simply follow people so that they can see your tweets of links, in the hope that one might click, then that's spam for me (which is why Matt Cutts, and the Google Spam team decided to add the nofollow attribute, I guess). This was also highlighted in a Guardian.co.uk article a while back (sorry, can't remember the link). The article highlighted how good Twitter would be in a specific location, due to it's speed. It used Barcelona as an example, and said that if someone was visiting Barcelona, and had a PDA/Iphone, etc. they could tweet people about Barcelona and receive real-time replies about places to go, events on that particular day, restaurants, etc. The author made the analogy that if you searched "Barcelona" on Twitter, there was a few random posts of people in Spanish, and then one particular agency (who I won't name) that replied to everyones tweet with spam messages about their Barcelona apartments.

For me the jury is out, as I think time could be better spent commenting on dofollow blogs, article writing or other such activities. I'd love to hear some positive stories about your Twitter experiences however, so please feel free to comment.

Barcelona SEO Training from Barcelona SEO tackles all types of social media and the possible impacts on your business. Please contact me for more details.