It wasn’t until I had the privilege of seeing Darren Rowse present at a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) conference, that the penny finally dropped. (Darren’s one of Australia’s leading bloggers, a title you don’t get without being very switched on, committed and genuine.)

The day after the conference, the moment I got into the office, I signed up to FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter (I was already a member of LinkedIn, FriendsReunited and LivingMemory). I didn’t think much of FaceBook and MySpace – and still don’t – but Twitter has been a revelation.

If you want your site to rank better in the search engines, you want more direct traffic, or you just want to engage better with customers and influencers, Twitter is a must. (In fact, 60% of Americans use Social Media, and 93% of them believe every company should have a Social Media presence. Cone)

But just in case you take one look at Twitter and say, “I don’t get it”, here’s a quick list of 10 tips for understanding it and making the most of it.

1. Twitter is like Instant Messaging Broadcasting – If you’re familiar with Instant Messaging through Windows Messenger, Skype or the dozens of other tools out there, you’ll be right at home with Twitter. It works in much the same way, except that your message (or ‘Tweet’) doesn’t go to just one person, it goes to everyone who has chosen to follow you. Oh, and you only have 140 characters per Tweet.
2. People Follow you if you talk about stuff that interests them – Although Twitter’s tagline and call to action is “What are you doing?”, it’s no longer really a forum for announcing what you had for lunch. The idea is to Tweet about the things that interest your Followers and, importantly, the people who you WANT to Follow you. If you’re a business marketer, your target Followers will be customers and influencers (people who influence your customers). So think about the things that they’ll find interesting.
3. The idea is to build up a community of Followers – Whatever your goal (search engine ranking, traffic or engagement), the means to that end is to become part of a relevant community. In the beginning, it’s mostly about you Following other people. But over time, as you Tweet more often and add more value, people will begin to Follow you. That’s when you start to develop a community all of your own – when you start to become a thought leader or influencer, yourself.
4. Find and Follow the right people – Search for relevant people. Pick a word that’s relevant to your industry, and search for it. The results will show you a list of recent Tweets related to that word, with the ‘Avatar’ (picture) of the Twitterer responsible for each, on the left. Click this pic to see the person’s bio and a list of all their Tweets. If they look relevant to you, Follow them. If not, come back to the search results, and check out the next result. Start out by Following as many thought leaders and influencers as you can – you’ll recognize them because they’ll have many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Followers. This is an incredibly effective way to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. There’s a very good reason they have such a huge Following.
5. Tweet to add value to your Followers – Although you have a commercial agenda, everything you do on Twitter needs to serve your Followers. Discuss only what they’re interested in hearing, and only as often as they want to hear it. Some people Tweet dozens of times every day, others tweet only once or twice a week. Both are OK, so long as your Followers are OK with it. And if you find yourself scratching for something to say, ask yourself if there’s some relevant way you could help your Followers. Have you just read a really helpful article, or visited a really interesting website or blog? If so, Tweet it, and include a link. (There are tools for shortening links so they don’t consume too many of your 140 characters – if you use Twhirl (discussed below), there’s one in-built.) So long as it’s relevant, these sorts of Tweets will be well received. Eventually you’ll become a trusted member of the community; people will recognize you, and will look forward to your Tweets. You may even use Twitter (as many do) to announce your physical location, e.g. “I’m at such-and-such a bar, if anyone wants to catch up!”
6. Understand and observe local etiquette – Darren Rowse advises people to treat every Social Media tool like a foreign country. Learn the language, the customs, the etiquette. Perhaps even find a local guide. By doing this, you won’t unknowingly offend anyone or make a fool of yourself!
7. Know how to Tweet – To Tweet publicly (to all your Followers), just type your message and press Enter. To address a public Tweet to someone in particular, prefix your message with “@username”. (OBVIOUSLY, you have to replace “username” with their actual username!) If you want to send a private/direct message to someone, prefix your message with “d @username” (again substituting their actual username). If you receive a Direct Message, it’ll be flagged as such, so make sure you reply in the same way. You can even forward someone else’s message on to all of your own Followers. This is called a Re-tweet. The Twitter interface (and Twhirl, discussed below) has all of this functionality inbuilt.
8. Don’t expect too much – You won’t always get an answer to your Tweets. Some people Follow thousands of people, so your Tweets may not always catch their attention. And they may not always want to answer. Everyone uses Twitter differently.
9. Use Twhirl, not your Web browser – Using Twitter in a web browser becomes very difficult, distracting and inefficient. You’ll find yourself continually opening and closing your browser and visiting and revisiting Twitter.com. It’s much more efficient to use a desktop application like Twhirl. It works much like Messenger or Skype; it beeps when a new Tweet arrives and beeps differently when you get a Direct Message. It offers pretty much the same functionality as you’d get in your browser (e.g. you can Tweet, Direct Message and Re-tweet, as well as to mark certain Tweets as Favorites, and Follow and Unfollow people).
10. Follow Darren Rowse. You’ll find that much more helpful than anything I’ve said in this post! And if you think my Tweets might be useful to you, you can follow me to!

The above 10 tips are just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more helpful guides out there for using Twitter. Here’s a good one to start with.

In V2.0 of my SEO ebook (which is soon to be released), I discuss how you can use Twitter to improve your search engine ranking. If you want to be notified when V2.0 of my ebook is released, please email me at glenn at divinewrite.com or bookmark my ebook sales page.

Happy Tweeting!

Apparently older versions of phpBB create something called a ‘bot-trap’ because they generate urls with session id’s for non-authenticated visitors (like bots). This means the bots encounter an endless number of links.

This phenomenon is also a problem if you automatically generate a Google Sitemap. The sitemap generator spiders the site like a bot and also encounters an endless number of links. This apparently chews up bandwidth and stops your generator from finishing the task.

I haven’t finished investigating this issue, but it all seems to point toward upgrading to v3 of phpBB - which apparently sorts all of these issues automatically.

See here and here for more info.

1. You write some copy and submit it to FreeCopywriting.com
2. Google automatically displays ads whenever someone views that copy
3. Google pays a commission whenever someone clicks on one those ads
4. Half the time, that commission goes to me. The other half of the time, it goes to you (assuming you’ve told us your Google AdSense ID)

It’s the ultimate annuity income. You write and post your copy once, and you earn income from it indefinitely! It’s like selling the same piece of copy again and again.

Find out more…

Client: Using SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, we came up with a list of possible keywords:

• “Digestive system” - 3336 hits from google
• “Digestive disorders” - 74
• “Natural health” - 205
• “Step by step” - 391
• “Naturopath” – 158
• “Naturopaths” – 61
• “Natural therapy” – 30
• Specific words - ailments and conditions - got higher hits and may be included on a specific page. E.g.: Autism, ADHD, Coeliac disease, Irritable bowel.

My Response:

1. I can combine “digestive system” and “digestive disorder” into “digestive system disorders”. Google is smart enough to recognise this combination, and would index you in searches for both. (Note that all things being equal, a site that targets the exact phrase “digestive disorder” will outrank you, but all things are rarely equal! This sort of approach makes very little difference to your overall SEO presence.)
2. I wouldn’t target “step by step” at all. Not in isolation, anyway. People who search for “step by step” could be searching for anything; if you managed to rank no.1 in the world for that phrase, the vast majority of your visitors wouldn’t be interested in natural therapies at all. They’d be interested in all sorts of things. However, because we still use “step by step” in the copy naturally, you’ll be indexed in searches for “digestive system disorders step by step”, and things like that.
3. I’d recommend targeting “naturopaths” over “naturopath” (see reasoning for combinations discussed in point 1 above). You’ll notice if you search for either, there are results for all sorts of similar words, including “naturopathy” and “naturopathic”. This shows you that Google is smart enough to find relevant sites even if the word isn’t EXACTLY what the user searched for. The only time it isn’t is when the user actually includes the quotes in their search. This would happen very rarely.
4. With only 30 searches reported, “natural therapy” might not be a very good phrase to target. There is a lot of competition for it. Do a worldwide search and you’ll see there are approx 10.5 million results. That means you’d have to work quite hard to rank for it, and you’d only get a very small reward (’cos not many people are searching for it).
5. Specific conditions - I’d recommend targeting only the ones that you’re really keen to win work from. i.e. If you really want to attract a lot of the traffic that’s searching for “autism”, then by all means target it. But if it’s only incidental, I’d think twice. There would be HEAPS of competition for this word. Probably for most specific conditions. So only choose the ones you really want. You can include the others, of course, but don’t make them your primary or secondary keyword phrases. Concentrate on the phrases that will bring you the most qualified traffic.
6. A note on using targeting specific words on specific pages… Generally speaking, targeting words or phrases on one page only will be pretty ineffective. Normally you need to have a lot of content related to the keywords you’re targeting – a lot more than just one page If google sees a lot of content, it assumes there must be something useful in there.

So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If you have any extras or any comments, please feel free to reply to the thread.

But they don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations, (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even take visual design and aural elements into account.
Search engines aren’t that sophisticated (even Google!). In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all; they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. The logic behind this behavior is that if a site is about widgets, the word “widgets” - and similar words - will naturally appear in these places at quite a high frequency. (That’s a little simplistic, but it’s about as much as most of us need to know about how search engines work. Their indexing algorithms involve incredibly complex maths - more than my little brain can handle! Learn more about how search engines evaluate content.)

So if you want your site to appear in the search results for “cheap glazier”, then you’d use that phrase relatively often throughout your site. This is known as ‘keyword density’. Simply put, keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%. (Here’s an easy-to-use keyword density calculator.)

Keyword density is a particularly problematic concept, mostly because people place great emphasis on it, when, in fact, the search engines don’t measure density like that at all. So when you hear all the rules about what density you should be aiming for, always bear that in mind. Don’t start thinking that the search engines are looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%; they’re not. Just use density calculations as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.

Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers.

There are several websites specifically designed to make keyword analysis easier. Two examples are:

1. Overture’s inventory tool. This tool is free and very easy to use and understand, but (last time I looked) it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword (and similar keywords).
2. WordTracker. WordTracker is a much more powerful tool, but you have to pay to use it (you can subscribe for a day for around $10). WordTracker helps you find the most appropriate keyword for your site by telling you what people are really searching for. Here’s how it works… You type in a word which summarizes what you do, and it tells you how many times that word has been searched for in the last month. It also tells you how many other websites are using that word as a keyword (i.e. targeting the same customers you are). Based on this information, it rates the word. The ‘best’ keywords are the ones that a lot of people are searching for but which few websites are targeting. WordTracker even suggests and rates alternative related words.

TIP: When you’re using WordTracker, bear in mind that it’s just talking about numbers, and numbers don’t always tell the whole story. So don’t just jump in and use the best rated keywords; you need to consider your own situation. It may be the case that you’re forced to select a keyword phrase which is not rated particularly highly. There are two situations in which this might happen:

• You’re in a niche market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation, you’ll probably find it relatively easy to reach the top of the rankings, but you won’t generate a huge volume of traffic when you get there. 
• A lot of your competitors are targeting your keyword (it’s hotly contested) but it’s the only one you can use. If you target it, you’ll just have to work a bit harder on your backlinks in order to rank highly. When there’s a lot of competition for a keyword, it’s likely that the traffic payoff is good once you reach top.

Following is a list of the main things you need to be aware of. I’m no web developer, so don’t take the below as gospel. Just discuss these things with your developer first. If you engage an experienced SEO web designer, they’ll already know all the issues (far more than are listed here).

Do’s…

1. Design your site in HTML – i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links at the base of each page as per existing site
2. Use static URLs
3. Use standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting for navigation menu
4. Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed.
5. Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. These tags are as follows:
6. tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site
7. tells the spiders not to index anything.
8. says don’t index this particular page, but follow its links to other pages (e.g. for use on secure or private pages).
9. says to index the page but not follow its links.
10. Create a 404 error handling page, and place a sitemap on the 404 page.
11. Create a text based site map containing links to every page in your site (see http://www.divinewrite.com/site.htm for an example).
12. Create a Google Sitemap (Read an overview of Google Sitemaps and download a great tool for generating Google Sitemaps)

Don’ts…

1. Don’t embed your copy within a graphic (the search engines won’t be able to read it)
2. Don’t use frames (this is a contentious one - some people use frames quite effectively)
3. Don’t use internal JavaScript or Flash (ditto)
4. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage (many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter)

Hope this helps.