Filipe's Blog

Twitter Account Suspended Story

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:55:00 -0400

I was reading an email from an associate and the weirdest thing happened to him. Apparently a call from one of his clients prompted him to the status of this twitter account, in which the client said "your twitter account is suspended!". Upon visiting his profile, the truth laid bare, in fact the twitter account was indeed suspended. My associate figured that this was some sort of rogue policing from the twitter.com staff, until he came across this page: http://bit.ly/3nSj5, indicating that It was in fact human error! As of earlier this morning, his account and everyone else' were restored - but not without both a lesson and bit of fright to be had. Lesson:

*Get prospects from social media sites to your blog and funnel as quickly as possible.
* Fright: Twitter, Facebook or any other social site is in control of your prospects. Not sure about you, but I don't like other people being in control of my destiny and success.

You see, I wasn't ever worried about suspension until this happened and I imagined the scenarios that could transpire far more heinous. It's smart to work on moving Twitter prospects to a blog or your owned online properties. While those social media sites are awesome and functional with very little to no downtime, ask yourself if you still need to consider a fast conversion to your own online properties is a good idea - and I am pretty sure you will agree that it is definitely a YES. Get to it, prepare the funnel and entice your base/prospects to go where you think most appropriate.

Meeting Cost Calculator

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:22:00 -0400

Every week I wonder about meetings in corporate environments. I mean, face time is always a good idea, however often times meeting time is abused with unfocused direction - leading to misspent time and ultimately money. It also is important to note that having too many "bodies" in a meeting can also degrade the performance and end results for which efficient actions can be taken.

Trawling the web, I found this nifty meeting cost calculator tool (http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/) to ascertain the cost of each meeting. When the bottom line is clearly defined, it makes folks prioritize communication, focus agenda's and coordinate the right set of folks to be attendants. Taking very good detailed notes will in turn provide additional direction for remaining members of a team who were not part of the main event.

Definitely feel free to share any additional tools and calculators that you find helpful so I can share with other readers. Thanks in advance!

SEO Checklist in a Hurry Audit List

Sun, 10 May 2009 17:13:00 -0400

No matter how well versed you are in SEO or not, checklists can help you or your clients to better hone their optimization work by checking simple or complex issues with a methodical approach.It may also occur that you are asked to do a "quick" audit of a site either for prospecting or as a favor, and a simple yet comprehensive checklist can certainly improve your speed to get the pertinent information to assess SEO status.

SEO Checklist

Here are the 5 items to check in short form:

1. URL issues (include URL canonicalization & 301 redirection). No matter what preferred homepage URL you plan on, it's important to consolidate all versions or iterations of the homepage to one. This includes additional domains that need to be forwarded to the main domain. Although this doesn't seem to be a big issue, each little bit can add up to a detrimental whole. Variations of the homepage URL can include:

http://www.site.com/index.html
http://www.site.com/index.htm
http://www.site.com/index.php
http://www.site.com/default.html
http://www.site.com/default.php
http://www.site.com/home

* https://www.site.com/* (where the asterisk indicates multiples of the URLs listed above in secure protocol URL versions)
These URLs need to all be pointed to the main site or chosen iteration of the homepage, such as http://www.site.com. Redirects can be added in apache ".htaccess" files or within configuration files for your webserver. An example of a redirect condition and rule set follows: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Note: This of course takes into account that mod_rewrite is enabled. Also check your specific version and webserver for configuration attributes or declarations. Be sure to take a quick gander at a sample of pages, including the homepage, category level pages, and some detail pages to locate redirect chains and/or 302 redirects (in the form of javascript, php or meta refresh redirects) which most likely require a shift to 301 redirects to take full advantage of SEO metric flow through the website.

2. Unique Titles & Meta Tags. Issue a site:www.site.com command to get a listing of all pages indexed, which allows one to find variations of titles or patterns that indicate duplicate content issues. Even a simple check into what is returned from Google, Yahoo! or MSN/Live gives you an idea of how unique or not pages are given title and description elements. Again, a sampling of pages may help determine the level of complexity on the issue pertaining specifically to that site.

3. Search Engine Friendly URLs. Looking at the mix of URLs that exist on the site, whether hand-coded or CMS generated, should help determine if more work is required to take parameter or nondescript page URLs to a keyword rich and effective URL schema. Parameters aren't as problematic as they used to be, but the preference is still to use "static" URL schemas without parameters (if possible). This allows for better organization of content, an easier and more enjoyable experience for users, and keyword rich URL structures for search engines. Definitely a win-win-win.

4. Webmaster Tools and Registrations. Get your websites registered with Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask.com (if you've got an XML sitemap - and you should). Try naming your XML sitemap something not so obvious, like "global.xml," to avoid competitor snooping, and submit the sitemap to all of the tools. I find the meta tag verification tags to be easier to place, but you can also choose to verify by placing files on your website which each of the webmaster programs walk you through - but this is your personal preference. If you do not have an automated XML sitemap, try using a tool like Coffeecup software's Google Site Mapper or any of the other free tools available online to generate one. Just be aware that not all of these tools work well and certain sites may cause programs to loop, generating a mass of useless duplicates...

5. Duplicate Content Check. This can be done manually or can be part of the process of issuing a site:www.site.com command in the major search engines to see which pages may be indexed with the same content under multiple URLs. Check also for multiple iterations of category and detail page levels so you avoid having http://www.site.com/doodads and http://www.site.com/do-dads. This can potentially cause dozens of iterations of the same content per URL, which is a big problem for rankings due to cannibalization and search engine choicing. Use of the tag on the http://www.site.com/do-dads URL can help alleviate this issue by indicating your preference of URLs to the engines. Be advised that this is a suggestion to the search engines and is not guaranteed in any way, yet all three (Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live) claim to abide by the tag. Much more can and will be added to a complete checklist, but this should certainly help get some of the major issues identified and will help in a more effective SEO strategy. Other things that can help you analyze a situation for SEO viability or problem solving include checking inbound links to determine types of links and popular areas on the site, checking IP blocks for neighboring websites to determine relationships and perceived tie-ins, and searching for inline coding issues which can hinder proper spidering. Originally Published on SEOmoz

Taking A Deep Dive Approach to Competitive Analysis for SEO

Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:00 -0400

Say you've got a competitor or perhaps competitors that are starting to trump you on the first page where you've been vehemently optimizing your website(s) and building valuable links, and without a seemingly good reason. What is an SEO to do but to start digging? Well, a good SEO digs the basics and an excellent SEO goes much further to understand the demographic, suspected patterns and technical advantages the competitor(s) has/have. With all of that info available, where does one start?

1. First, begin by jotting down or comparing which keywords or phrases are being matched by competitors, then see where they rank on the top three engines (as of this writing: Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

2. Pick the top 3 competitors, whether they are brands competing against you, sites ranking in the positions you are seeking to gain, or unrelated sites.

3. Scan the homepage, category pages and perhaps some of the specific content pages that are outranking your results to identify best practices and "grade" them against your own.

4. Check for site-side and external SEO metrics like:

Inbound links (Google / Yahoo!)
Indexed pages
Elements in play (headers, title tag, meta tags, copy)
URL naming & internal linking practices
508A compliance, alt tag use and HTML code vs. content
Blog entries
Current news or PR
Social network content or links
Types of sites linking in

5. Visit Quantcast.com, Compete.com, Alexa.com and Aboutus.org to identify traffic, demo and ranking metrics to see where the sites fall in comparison to your own.

6. Conduct a Ben Franklin close / Balance Sheet Close where you take the "pros" and "cons" into a list comparing your site to the three competitors based on the collected intel to see who wins and by how much.

7. Begin thinking about methods that you've not taken advantage of from the items listed and come up with the top three methods/tactics you need to employ to keep up or exceed competitors.

8. Pages identified from competitors that do not have merit after these checks deserve more of a deep-dive and will require you to comb through the code on the page(s) to see if suspicious efforts or code is being used, or perhaps a "mistake" in a technical platform is allowing the competitor to gain advantage. Mark observations down for review.

9. Finally, ask SEOs in the community if you are unsure about the code (obscure offender to give benefit of the doubt) to see if the site or page is doing something that can either be:
* Reported to search engines
* Replicated for use as it abides by guidelines and could be useful as an SEO tactic.

At this point, much of the information gathered will lend to more understanding of the playing field and allow you to test our new initiatives or to focus further on what was already part of your plan. Be sure to be careful in this process not to take everything as employable; do remember that there may be unfair advantages employed by competitors that the search engines will allow (to them), or that a piece of information could be erroneous or even detrimental - so read up or ask about something if possible to avoid being caught up in a black hat tactic that will get you the opposite of what you are trying to achieve. Last piece of advice is be persistent. As in any field of professionalism, perseverance will always get the benefit at the end of the day, so don't give up if you want to be great.

Filipe's Blog

Twitter Account Suspended Story

Meeting Cost Calculator

SEO Checklist in a Hurry Audit List

SEO Checklist

Taking A Deep Dive Approach to Competitive Analysis for SEO

Originally Published on SEOmoz's Blog March 15th, 2009