Most of the the tutorials on the web dealing with growing your Twitter followers, don’t pay any attention to location, and are more concerned with raw numbers. I recently started a local travel website and wanted to focus on gaining local followers from that city and surrounding areas. While I can’t reveal the profile, this tutorial will walk you through how I did it.

First the background: this was a travel related website in one of the top 20 metros in the United States…

Google recently announced they will start to pre-render pages in Chrome to “improve the user experience.” IMHO this represents nothing more than the latest effort by Google to throw publishers under the bus to gain market share for one of their products and ultimately give them more data about their users to better target their advertising.

Whenever Google says they are only interested in “serving the users” or “improving the user experience,” I think of the classic Twilight Zone Episode about the aliens who only wanted “to serve man” … At the time of this post being published, the exact details and implementation aren’t perfectly defined, but if you are technically minded and curious, you can read about it in Google’s prerender whitepaper…

While Google’s Panda update has many different aspects, one thing is certain: Google is looking for signals of trust, authority, and real branding. They are looking for signals that thin content mfa sites and thin content affiliates will have a hard time building. If you are a website or business owner, what are some thing you can do to send these signals to Google? In this post I’ll give you a few ideas…

Once you have gotten past the hurdle of getting followers on Twitter, chances are good that you will want to know what is the best time to push out your content-marketing tweets or commercially-oriented tweets. I recently came across a tool that analyzes your Twitter followers and tries to give you some statistics to help you find the best time to send out those tweets.

The key is to find a way to balance being on Twitter, being involved in your community, sharing links, and meeting your content marketing goals…Before I dig into this topic, I want to address any concerns from the social media unicorns and rainbows crowd…

If I had the ability to reach through the screen, grab you by the shoulders, look you in the eye, and tell you that building a mobile version of your website should be your number one IT project this year, I would. While I may be on the bleeding edge of mobile consumption, the adoption of smart phones, tablets, and iPads into the main stream population can’t be denied. As Steve Wozniak said “The tablet is the PC for normal people…

In my opinion, SEO for your competition is one of the more underutilized tactics today. You can try to optimize for your competition’s company name, products, or even comparison searches. In this post, I’ll take you through the process and what to watch out for.

Expect whatever relationship you currently have to become much more adversarial than it is now …Anyone who has done any work in the ORM (Online Reputation Management) space can tell you: until a negative article hits the newspapers or press, there usually isn’t a lot of competition for a company’s name…

Reviews are an extremely powerful asset for many websites. They can provide a continual stream of fresh, new, and unique content that is good for the users, which is ultimately what everyone wants. However, there are some upsides and downsides to reviews, and there is the big hurdle of figuring out how to get reviews and integrate them. In this post, we’ll take a look at these different aspects…

The following is a review of the WP Review Site Plugin for WordPress. Recently, I decided to add reviews to one of my websites and WP Review Site Plugin was one of the two plugins I narrowed it down to (see My Review Plugin Review for the other). I was able to narrow it down to these two, but I wasn’t able to see how well they interfaced without purchasing both plugins and trying them out…

The following is a review of the MyReviewPlugin for WordPress. Recently, I decided to add reviews to one of my websites and MyReviewPlugin was one of the two plugins I narrowed it down to (see WP Review Site Plugin Review for the other). I was able to narrow it down to these two but wasn’t able to see how well they interfaced without purchasing both plugins and trying them out. To be clear, I paid for both of these plugins myself…

Anyone who travels and speaks at conferences on a regular basis has, at one point or another, forgotten or lost a presentation. If you use a Mac and Dropbox, I’m going to show you how to prevent that from happening.

For me, Dropbox is one of those essential cloud computing tools that makes getting things done easier…First, you are going to need a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one (see my Dropbox Review post)…

The following is part of a series on using the Hootsuite social media tool. In this post, we are going to be looking at at using the feature to post to your Facebook page or profile.

If you are a fan of scheduling your social media activities, and I strongly recommend this behavior, you’ll find there aren’t a lot of tools that interface with Facebook. Thankfully Hootsuite does…

When I talk with new, existing or potential clients about blogging or content marketing strategies, many of them are confused about how to run a good corporate blog. How do they write about things that customers and potential customers will find interesting or link worthy without being too salesy or too pushy. In this post, I’ll take a look at what I consider to be some bad examples and, more importantly, some good examples…

The following review is a sponsored post for Anafore Customer Referral Program.

Anafore customer referral program is an email add on that merchants or online stores can use to incentivize customers to share promotional offers with their friends in exchange for their own promotional offers. Basically, when a customer completes an order, it sends them an email asking them to forward this offer (like a 10% discount)…

Getting more Twitter followers is one of the first hurdles you have when you start a new Twitter account. Assuming that you are interested in quality and not just quantity, one of the most effective tactics is what I like to call a follower raid.

if 15% of the people who follow Coke-a-Cola follow you back, but 30% of the people who follow McDonalds follow you back, you should raid McDonalds Twitter followers more often …While this name may have a slightly dark or black hat pirate overtone to it (arrrgh), quite simply it’s using other existing accounts in your particular niche and mining through the people who follow them…

The following is part of a series on the Bufferapp twitter tool. This a general overview and review of the product. Bufferapp is a product which claims to take a lot of the frustration out of scheduling tweets–and it does. However, at the time of this review’s writing, it also has some serious limitations that you should be aware of.

First, let’s step you through how to use the product…

About Us pages are one of the essential elements of a trusted website (see How to Make Your Website Seem More Legitimate); however, most people dread writing them or treat them as an after thought. But, with a little creativity, you can turn an ordinary “About Us” page into something really interesting. In this post, we’re going to take a look at three examples.

Most “About Us” pages are so banal they could be used as sleep aids for insomniacs…

It seems everyone in social media and SEO is obsessed with Facebook now. Getting Facebook fans and Facebook likes may have even eclipsed link buying as the new black hat way of gaming the system … So what are you doing to get Facebook likes?

Before we talk about getting likes, let’s take a step back and look at what are some of the benefits of getting fans and likes? SEOMoz recently published a study showing a correlation between getting liked on Facebook and improving your rankings…

The following is part of a series on using the Hootsuite social media tool. In this post we are going to be looking at using the bulk scheduling feature.

First, we are going to take a step back and look at the two basics ways to schedule tweets so you get an idea of how things work before we get into bulk scheduling. Using the Hootsuite dashboard, you can enter a tweet the way you normally would but, instead of hitting “tweet,” you click the schedule button…

Recently, during the Q&A part of a conference session I was attending, someone asked, “Can small businesses do their own SEO?” It’s not an easy question to answer but, in a post Panda Update world … I think the answer is no.

There are lots of things small businesses can do. I’ve mentioned some of them in ways to promote your small business for free and promote your small business for $888…

One of the most difficult conversations I have with new or perspective clients is about Linkbait and content marketing and explaining how its real goal isn’t to drive sales but to build links, build awareness, and send social signals to the search engines. To make this post useful and actionable, I’m going to take you through the process/planning stage for a former client I had who has since sold his business…

Article marketing has been one of the foundations of link building ever since I got started in SEO. However, since sites like Ezinearticles and Suite 101 have taken a huge loss in ranking and traffic as a result of the panda update, should article marketing still be a part of your overall strategy? We need to take a step back and look at the big picture to find the answer …

While many people will debate this, I don’t believe sites like Ezinearticles were passing much link equity for quite some time…

The Filter Bubble is a new book by Eli Pariser that addresses the subject of how personalization of sites like Google and Facebook are sheltering us from information that doesn’t agree with our world view. Instead of the Internet being a window to new experiences and viewpoints, it becomes a mirror, reflecting back only what we already believe.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will state that I was given a review copy of this book, but it didn’t influence my opinion of the book…

Whenever I see someone else’s linkbait that fails, one of the common reasons is the failure to understand the need for instant gratification. I came across a text book example of this recently so I thought I would share it with you.Like my evil twin brother, Machu Picchu is on my bucket list of places to see before I die. It’s this mystical spiritual place up in the mountains of Peru…

One of the first questions that I like to talk with new clients about are their keywords: what are the keywords they want to rank for and why. The answers are consistently surprising.

Client: We want to rank for terms “x,y, and z.”
Me: Are those your best converting keywords?
Client: Well, I’m not really sure, but they do have the most search volume.
Me: You don’t really care about search volume unless you sell CPM based advertising…

Dear Matt Cutts, will you please stop waking up my wife in bed! Ok, sure, I’m having a bit of fun. Matt Cutts isn’t really stopping by my house, and I certainly hope he’s not in my bedroom. He is, however, waking up my wife … or, more correctly, his webmaster central YouTube videos are …

In late 2008, you will notice Matt slowed down his blogging pace and switched over to making videos…

Does the number of ads on your website affect it’s linkability? IMHO, yes it does. I do most of my reading on my iPad, using either Ziteapp or Instapaper. Both of these tools do a good job of stripping the content down to its most essential elements and displaying it in a readable format. Unfortunately for publishers, this includes stripping out the advertising (see Advertising and Usability)…

The following is part of a series on image optimization. In this post, we’re going to be talking about images for increasing the success of linkbait.

While the long term viability of the infographic as a linkbait tactic remains to be seen, there’s no question that adding images to your posts can definitely increase a post’s linkability. First, as an example of how having no images can ruin a post, take a look at this post on  Museums in New York City from Frommers (screen shot)…

I’m a big fan of the Sonos music system. When they recently asked if I’d like to review the new AirPlay integration feature, I was pretty excited. A few weeks later, an Apple Airport Express Base Station and some cables arrived with a diagram of how to hook it up. It’s pretty easy. You connect the base station via network cable and one audio cable then plug it into a nearby outlet…

Social Media still scares many businesses both large and small. But hiding from social media isn’t the answer. The real answer lies in embracing it … in all of its brutal, raw honesty.

Not participating doesn’t make people stop talking about you. It just means you aren’t part of the conversation… Let’s look at the case of restaurant reviews. In the past, small local restaurants had the upper hand…

The following is a review of the WPTouch Pro Mobile Theme. This is a premium theme that I paid for. This is NOT a sponsored review. I’ve been an big advocate of keeping a website on one URL and not using m.example.com, example.com/mobile/, or example.mobi as your solution (see Dangers of Multiple Website Versions). I’ve also shown example of how Google can get mobile website detection wrong…