Michael Campbell has just completed his lengthy essay on how to get top SERP rankings using his Jiggling the Web techniques.

It works, I have been following Michael since Feb. of 2007 and his methods do one thing: They work.

This is not vodoo or black hat tips, but straight forward step by step instructions. The beauty is…his method is only 7 steps!

I am not going to steal his thunder here with my post. You may obtain this invaluable information for free here at JigglingTheWeb.com.

Boomer 54
Mark

Share on Facebook

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business by Chris Brogan

Thanks Chris for letting me share this with my readers.

 First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

1. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
2. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
3. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
5. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
6. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
7. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
8. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
9. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
10. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

1. You don’t have to read every tweet.
2. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
3. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
4. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
5. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
7. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
8. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
9. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
10. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

1. Twitter takes up time.
2. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
3. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
4. There are other ways to do this.
5. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
6. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
7. Twitter is just for technonerds.
8. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
9. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
10. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

1. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
2. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
3. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
4. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
5. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
6. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
7. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
8. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
9. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
10. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

You can find Chris Brogan’s New York Times best seller Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust 

Share on Facebook

Aaron Wall just posted this and we wanted to share this info to our readers. He really has a knack for explaining complicated material. The best quote below is:

“the less reliant your site is on Google the more Google will want to rely on your site.“

See below for the comparison less than 1 minute of reading.

3 Common SEO Approaches

There are 3 basic ways to approach search engine optimization

• a mechanical strategy, where you try to outsmart the search engines and stay ahead of their relevancy algorithms
• a marketing-based approach, where you try to meet ranking criteria by creating the types of content that other people value and making sure you push market it aggressively
• a hybrid approach, where you take the easy mechanical wins…but are primarily driving your decisions based on fundamental marketing principals

Comparing the 3 Strategies

For most people the first approach is simply too complex, risky, and uncertain to be worth the effort. Not only do the sites get burned to the ground, but it happens over and over again, so it is quite hard to build momentum and a real business that keeps growing. In fact, most of the top “black hat” SEOs have “white hat” sites that help provide stable income in case anything happens to their riskier sites. Some people are great at coming up with clever hacks, but most people would be better off focusing on building their business using more traditional means.

If search engineers have access to the source code and still don’t know everything then how can people outside the company know everything? They can’t. Which is why we take a hybrid approach to SEO.

The approach we teach is the hybrid approach - a marketing-based strategy with some easy mechanical wins mixed in. Our customers take some of these easy wins to help differentiate their strategy from uninformed competitors, and then use marketing principals to build off of early success.

The Paradox of SEO

In using a marketing based approach you build up many signals of trust and many rankings as a side effect of doing traditional marketing. If people are talking about you and like your products then you are probably going to get some free high-quality links. And this leads us to the paradox of SEO: “the less reliant your site is on Google the more Google will want to rely on your site.”

If you want good information to find out what is working and what is not, you can use our site search to find answers to most common SEO questions, and know you are getting answers from a trust-worthy source. The information we give away is of higher value than what most people sell.

If you still have specific questions about your site, and would like our opinions we recommend joining our online training program - which will give you immediate access to bounce your questions off of hundreds of the top SEOs from around the world. Here is your link to fast-track ranking success: http://www.seobook.com/4973.html

Thanks for letting us help you out. We wish you luck and great success in the search results!

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

P. S. If you would like to stay up with the latest changes in search subscribe to our blog for FREE by email (or RSS) you can do so on this page.

Share on Facebook

This was just posted by one of my favorite Internet Marketers Perry Marshall. He is always spot on, down to earth with advice that really works and NO HYPE.

One of my colleagues was asked to help with a site that was severely slapped - had Quality Scores of 1 - and because of his close relationship with Google, he was able to get a “real” Google rep to give him a “real” answer to why the site was slapped.

The answer:

“I would not send my grandma to this site.”

Yeah, I know, some people will retort, “What does YOUR GRANDMA have to do with anything?”

I looked at the site and I would not send my grandma there either.

The person at Google didn’t elaborate. So please permit me to elaborate.

This particular site was selling a specific business opportunity. The hype factor was through the roof, it was a pure “squeeze page” with nowhere else you could go to learn about the vendor, all the bullets were tease and the claims were extraordinary.

It had a smarmy feel.

Google didn’t like it. So somewhere in the account, a Google reviewer punched in a low quality score, and all the keyword and SEO tweaks in the world won’t change that.

I realize this is all totally subjective on Google’s part. But it tells you a few interesting things:

-Google is NOT just run by robots. They’ve got more than enough money to put real people on the assignment and they do.

-In my opinion Grandma is a GREAT criteria. Grandma doesn’t know nuthin’ about the Internet so she trusts you to tell her who’s OK to listen to. Should she sink her retirement money into that bizop? Well in Google’s opinion, if there’s more than a 10% chance of her getting screwed, then… absolutely not. Remember: If grandma doesn’t have a tech-savvy grandson, then she has to rely on Google.

-The site failed to prove what it was saying. Let’s say this bizop was totally legit. If so then they should be able to prove it. Names, cities, states, numbers. Qualifications, cautions, requirements.

-The site should have contact information, preferably including street address and phone number, and not appear to be some guy hiding behind his computer.

Might I suggest…. add “Would a Google rep send her grandmother to this site” to your bag of tricks and let’s all do our best to make the Internet a more trustworthy place.

Perry Marshall

http://www.perrymarshall.com/googles-secret-criteria/

Share on Facebook

This was a great tip for all you baby boomers with service or brick and mortar businesses from Michael Campbell of Internet Marketing Secrets. Sign up for his newsletter no fluff just real stuff you can use.

Squid Zippers by Squidoo

Want to show up in Google results when people
type a keyword followed by a city name? It’s
like being Mayor of your neighborhood and zip
code. One gal already has 23 Zip lenses, and a
few have made it to page #1 on Google, for the
search terms “notary” plus the name of the city.

http://www.squidu.com/blog/2009/08/04/promote-virtually-to-be-found-locally/

Share on Facebook