Venice is a substantial update to the Google algorithm and is likely to impact significantly upon local SEO strategies.  The exact quote is included below:

“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.“

To quickly summarise, following the Venice update if you search for simply “electrician”, Google will now return results related to your physical location.  Previously to return such location targeted results within standard SERPs would require the inclusion of a location modifier within the search query. The result of this update now means every site offering a geographically targeted service must now have a local SEO strategy. Any website which does not feature geographically targeted content will begin to lose rankings for more and more generic keywords.

Different Ways to Use Twitter Marketing

There are many different ways to incorporate Twitter into your current marketing campaigns.  Possibly the most common method is to utilise Twitter to share information.  Twitter allows you to share small snippets of information with a large number of followers at the click of a mouse.  These small snippets of information can be public service announcements, news updates, business news or family or friend updates.

As Twitter was primarily developed to constantly feed current updates to followers, it is a natural tool for the marketing of a business.  Most commonly short marketing messages are shared over Twitter through a Tweet which contains a link to more relevant information.  Twitter allows businesses to share information over a global network allowing both prospective customers and existing customers to discover and follow the information you share across the network.

Twitter Etiquette

When conducting marketing activities on Twitter a strict etiquette must be followed.  If this etiquette is not followed then followers can quickly feel alienated leading to potential damage to your brand.

Twitter is primarily focussed on the here and now.  It makes a great marketing tool for promoting timely news and products, for example today’s lunch special offers.  The promotion of events is also an excellent and highly rewarding use of Twitter.  Tweets should ideally be kept conversation in tone and casual in tone.  Advertising should not appear as “in your face” advertising.

Give Your Tweets Personality

The more personality you create for your brand, the easier it will be to tweet about it.  A unique voice will make your tweets entertaining.  Entertaining Tweets help to engage readers and attract more followers.  Ideally you should attempt to wrap your tweets around a nugget of important information, and then deliver the tweet in an entertaining and conversational manner. Ideally your followers should look forward to hearing from you, this will increase the likelihood of them reading your tweets and marketing messages.

Another area where Twitter is particularly beneficial is in the area of customer communication and feedback.  Twitter is designed to be conversational, and it is a great way to keep a dialogue going with your existing customers and prospective customers.  Twitter is a great way to collect feedback from existing customers and particularly useful for reputation building.  Both essential if you wish to retain customers and learn how to attract increases numbers of prospective customers.

1. Make sure your video is professionally done.

The first step and possibly the most important is to ensure your video looks professional. If your video looks like a home movie then it will fail to establish credibility and ultimately trust from viewers. While many video sharing websites such as YouTube are filled with low quality poorly produced videos, this is actually changing rapidly. As more and more companies begin to realise the full potential of online video as a tool for promoting themselves more are directing marketing spend toward this activity.

2. Submit your video to as many video sharing websites as possible

While YouTube is by far the clear market leader and website of choice for many, there are other video sharing websites you should consider. These websites include:

• Google Video
• Yahoo! Video
• Daily Motion
• MySpaceTV
• MetaCafe
• Revver
• Veoh
• Blinkx
• Break

3. Feature your video on the home page of your website

You have taken the time to produce your video masterpiece, you should be proud of what you have produced and give it the exposure it deserves. An excellent way to do this is by placing it on the homepage of your website. This will display it to almost all visitors to your website and most importantly the search engines will reward you for this key placement.

4. Ensure your video title contains the keywords you would like it to be found on

Identify the keywords which you would like your video to be found on. Once you have identified these keywords, perform keyword analyse and identify the keywords which could deliver the highest traffic volumes.

5. Ensure Your META tags are SEO-friendly

Most video sharing websites allow you to tag videos with keywords and post a short descriptive piece of text. Ensure you get the most from these attributes by ensuring they are keyword rich.

6. Upload a thumbnail

A thumbnail is typically a still shot from your video that appears along side your video within search results. Choose a key moment in the video to present yourself in the best possible light. Preferably a headshot and a smiling face.

7. Link back to your site

Ensure there is a link back to your website contained within the video’s description. This will potentially benefit your search engine ranking and allow prospective clients to quickly learn more information.

8. Interact with your viewers

Most video sharing websites now allow viewer comments to be added by users. Ensure you take this opportunity to answer questions, respond to comments, and further promote your business wherever possible.

In my own personal experience a typical scenario for many clients is they have their new website designed and developed. Content is then added to the website primarily from corporate leaflets and company brochures. Time then passes with the new website receiving relatively low levels of traffic! As more and more time passes the situation grows increasingly more dire resulting in increased pressure on the management team to attract more visitors and substantiate the development costs of the new website. During this time it is likely a PPC advertising platform such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing will be utilised to try and increase the number of targeted visitors. While this is a sound strategy in the short term and can actually provide highly beneficial keyword research data for a longer term SEO strategy, it rarely makes for a sustainable longer term online marketing strategy.

Typically after a period of around 6 to 12 months when monthly PPC budgets have reached an all time high and organic visitors numbers have failed to increase as expected the decision will be taken to call in an SEO expert. The SEO expert is tasked with building a longer term more sustainable online marketing strategy with search engine optimisation as its focus to try and rescue some search engine rankings.

Unfortunately this is a scenario I experience far too often. Business owners who have fallen victim to this “hope and pray” website development cycle will certainly support me in saying this is not the best way to ensure the success of a new website. It can both delay a website reaching it’s full potential by many months and even years, but also result in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospects.

Many web design and web development companies claim in their sales pitch to be SEO experts. A quick browse through their client portfolio can often reveal their lack of SEO knowledge and expertise. This will be evident when you investigate the search engine visibility of both their own website and their listed clients.

So can you really optimise a website for search engine visibility before you launch it? The answer is yes, ideally web design and SEO should go hand in hand. The thought process for optimising a website should form the foundations of the web design/development from the outset. It is the website structure and content which will ultimately help to capture free organic web traffic.

Search engines to a large extent don’t care what a website looks like. Web designers and web developers should take the greatest advantage from the opportunity which is available when a website is first indexed. This opportunity is often wasted if basic SEO principles are not part of the initial web design and development process. Extra time and money should be spent on pre development SEO. This SEO should at the very least include keyword research and SEO copywriting. Conducting SEO so early within the development of a website can provide an outstanding return on investment as a website achieves a strong search engine position from day one.

If a web design agency is not promoting SEO as part of its initial client brief then they are both missing an opportunity for themselves and more importantly for their clients. The opportunity for maximum return on investment should be realied from day one.

1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing personal information about yourself

If you are embracing social media to push a business interest then it’s a good idea that you share personal information but not private information to as wider audience as possible. If you are only looking to reconnect with old school friends then your target audience will be much smaller and the information you share is likely to be somewhat more private. If sharing information about yourself makes you nervous then compare the difference between personal and private information. Personal information is a book you want to recommend to others. Private is a fight you had with your partner last night over their views of the book.

2. Ask your web savvy friends which social media site you should join first

Firstly I would recommend you join only one social media site to dip your toe in the water. If you join several social media websites you may become overwhelmed by the experience.

If you wanting to reach a very wide audience then you may choose Twitter as it is open to everyone. If you want to search for old school friends then you may choose Facebook where you can ensure your personal and private information is confined to a very small group of friends who you choose. If you are looking to make connections for a future job search then you may choose LinkedIn whose focus is much more business orientated.

3. Once you have selected your very first social media website, search for information and guidance on how to get the very best from the experience

Before you start searching for information about your chosen social media website you must ensure that it does not simply become an excuse for putting off actually joining the website. Learn a few very basic steps on how to effectively use the website. If you do learn these basic steps you will be way ahead of most other people, when they first approach social media. Once you know the basics the best thing to do is learn on the actual website itself. These is no substitute for actually trying things yourself and by far the fastest way to learn.

4. Choose your username very carefully, it is likely in time you will use the same identifier across several social media website

You must remember that whatever you do online can live forever, a scary thought but true. So the choice of your username should be considered very carefully for continued long term use. Hopefully once you have a strong reputation with a particular username you will not want to start from scratch if you decide you now prefer an alternative username.

5. Post a photo of yourself as soon as possible

Ideally you should choose a photo that will work across a variety of social media websites, including websites you have not yet joined.

Ideally the photo should be a portrait picture with you not wearing a hat or sunglasses, allowing people to easily recognise and interact with you online. The photo does not need to be professional, however it should not be blurry and of a reasonable quality. By posting a good headshot of yourself you’re signalling that you’re interested in connecting with people and you’ll be off to a good start on your first social media site.

Now that you’ve read these 5 basic steps, what are you waiting for? Join the social media community today!

Twitter is currently valuated at around $1 billion and has yet to fully announce a long term business model for its service. These new paid business accounts will provide a very welcome revenue stream for the platform and it’s investors.

As part of the announcement Stone also revealed Twitter would consider signing deals with other companies to licence its content and live data streams. Last month Twitter signed partnerships with both Google and Microsoft to integrate its real-time search results in to each respective search engine.

He also didn’t rule out the possibility of partnerships with news agencies and media organisations. Twitter is often used by media organisations to gather news stories. News of significant events and other crucial events are often spread first on Twitter before being pickup by the mainstream media. An example of this is the plane that crash landed in the Hudson River in New York. News and even pictures of the crash appeared on Twitter within minutes of the crash, far quicker than the media could respond. Stone said he was looking forward to seeing what news organisation could really do with Twitter if they were given an increased level of access.

For example let’s assume your website has been live for a period of 6 months or more and you assume for whatever reason that you can get a higher search engine ranking if you were using a particular keyword in your domain name instead of your current domain name. As a result you rush out and purchase keyword1.co.uk, keyword2.co.uk and keyword3.co.uk.

From the search engines perspective there is a good way and a harmful method to assign these additional domains to your website. Opting for the detrimental method can cause a significant problem in terms of a website’s organic ranking which can result from duplicate content and trust. Duplicate content occurs when identical or very similar content is placed on two separate websites. If similar content is identified on two separate domains Google will discount the domain it has less history and trust with.

There are a number of common methods available to point multiple domain names to your web server. These methods include:

• Domain Mirroring
• Domain Cloaking
• Domain Alias
• Domain Redirecting

Domain mirroring or Domain masking is sometimes called a pointer domain. When viewed in a browser it looks like the domain but it is simply a mask overlaying the real domain name and its content.

Domain cloaking typically uses an iframe or embedded frameset to display the content of one website within another website.

Domain redirecting also often called URL redirecting requires all traffic that travels through the new domain name to be redirected to the original main domain name. This can also be a domain redirected to a subdirectory of the main domain. Domain redirecting is different from domain mirroring and domain cloaking because users visiting the new domain are automatically redirected to the original domain and the domain name changed in the address bar accordingly.

Conclusion

To prevent confusion, it’s better to change the brand to better reflect the keyword-rich domain name. This could be as simple as updating your logo.

The technical procedure for redirecting domain names must be done so that search engines do not become confused as to what you are trying to achieve. If not you risk alerting a duplicate content filter which forces the search engines to accept only one domain with that exact content. However the biggest risk is tripping an alarm with the search engines that you are trying to trick them into giving you a better rank.

If you use any other method to redirect a domain other than domain redirecting, you are likely to be disappointed with the resulting ranking positions. Domain mirroring and domain cloaking simply confuse search engines because they see the same content under a different domain name. Google then selects one of the domain names to display that content and leaves the others out of the search results. Google chooses which domain to rank, with the decision out of your control.

The more serious issue with domain mirroring and cloaking is the probability that the search engines suspect you are trying to manipulate their rankings by suddenly using keywords in additional domain names. The ultimate result is either loss of whatever good ranking you did originally have or your site is banned from Google altogether!

Here’s is a rough translation of Twitter’s Blog post, via Google Translate:

“Earlier this month we invite volunteers to translate into more languages Twitter. Thanks to these enthusiastic volunteers hispanoparlantes, Twitter is now officially available in Spanish. You can change the language or visit Twitter.com Settings and change the language setting in the option at the bottom right corner.

Some users hispanoparlantes Pepe Aguilar (@ PepeAguilar), Manu Ginobili (@ manuginobili), Jose Hernandez (@ Astro_Jose), Andreu Buenafuente (@ buenafuente), Juan Fonseca (@ Fonseca) and La Moncloa in Spain (@ desdelamoncloa) had discovered the Twitter value even before we released the translated version. We hope to offer Twitter in Spanish means more people able to access and enjoy this service.

Welcome!”

While browsing Twitter you may have begun to notice that volunteer translators are now rewarded with a special icon on their profile, similar to the ones displayed on verified accounts. The numbers of these are likely to increase greatly over the coming months as Twitter seeks to expand from it’s current languages of English, Japanese and as of today Spanish.

Facebook has followed a very similar and highly successful community driven translation strategy, which has now resulted in it being translated into more than 70 languages as of today. Is this the future for Twitter?

From the general noise on Twitter the attacks seem to be quite widespread.  I’ve personally received several direct messages along the lines: “I made $426.23 online today with [link]” and “I make money online with Google. I learned how here [link]”.

Any similar message should be treated as a possible fraudulent message.  Here’s what you should do if you receive one of these direct Twitter messages:

Firstly do not visit the link in the message.  This is primary method to prevent being scammed or your PC infected with malicious software.  Secondly change your password straight away if you think you may have fallen victim to one of these scams.  Do not give your Twitter information to anyone who you do not trust or have the slightest concerns about.  Many new twitter applications request you to enter your username and password in order to utilise them.  Always ensure the Twitter application is legitimate and make sure that the address bar displays a legitimate link, rather than a spoof URL often used by scammers.  Finally use OAuth to log into 3rd party Twitter apps whenever possible.

Today after 6 long months of testing ‘Similar Images’ has become a standard feature within Google Image Search.  If you haven’t used this fantastic new feature, here’s a recap of what it can do.

Similar Images uses Google’s Image recognition technology.  This technology has previously been implemented in Google Image Colour Search, which allows you to narrow down image searches based on a specified colour.  ’Similar Images’ takes this technology to a whole new level.  For example if you are a bit of a petrol head and run an image search for the term ‘Mini Cooper’.  You can then narrow down your results further by identifying a particular image and then clicking the ‘similar images’ link.  If you have picked an image of a Blue Mini Cooper it will return more results of Blue Mini Coopers.  Every time I run an image search I am amazed how accurate the results are.  The feature has saved me countless hours searching for images.  In the past I have entered additional search terms to narrow down my search results, however this has often excluded many useful results.  Google ‘Similar Images’ Search now eliminates the need for me to do this.

The screenshot below shows a selection of the images returned from the search term: “mini cooper”:

The next screenshot shows the related image results returned by clicking on the ‘Find similar images’ link below the first image:

I am sure following its debut as a standard feature within Google Image Search we will now see many more people utilising this highly valuable new search feature in the coming weeks and months.