Twitter

Topping the list this year is #egypt, marking the January uprising in the country. The catalyst for what has become known as the “Arab Spring”.

Helping this to the top of the list was how eager the media tweets were to include it; ensuring their feeds were read. It is surprising though that other countries have not appeared in the top ten – particularly the fact that #Libya did not make it.

In at number two is #tigerblood. Coming on the back of Charlie Sheen’s rather colourful episodes this year, this was huge in the States and soon went global.

This entry highlights what Twitter is most famous for; namely mindless celebrity gossip, though it was the only entry of its kind in the top ten.

At number three was #threewordstoliveby. Showing that Twitter also has a philosophical side, such hashtags do appear regularly, most often originating where it is late at night – not a great surprise perhaps.

Monitoring what was popular is certainly interesting and wastes a little time, but the power of hashtags is something that SEO strategists would do well to understand.

Writing relevant and pithy comments, tagged with a popular hashtag, can increase followings on Twitter and in turn, lead to greater traffic hitting a company’s main site.

SEO

Choosing a server is an optimisation issue. Your server can prevent internet users from accessing your site, can undermine your reputation, and can directly affect your relationship with Google. Here are some of the issues:

1. Security. A shared server can be a security risk, which in turn can cause issues for your SEO. If a site on your shared server is hacked or contains spam, it can undermine your relationship with your own site users and with the search engines. It can also affect your reputation if your site’s address is linked to a spammy site.

2. Connections. A server issue that many site owners overlook is the possibility of dropped connections. There are only so many connections possible on a single server. This can affect how Google accesses and indexes your site.

3. Real-world hosts. A server in Edinburgh is all well and good, but if you operate from Liverpool it’s going to be difficult to check on the site’s security and emergency plan. A blackout or flood could put you out of business for days at a time.

Shared web hosting can be the only affordable option for a new site. If you’re using your site for business, however, it’s worth considering exactly what your server is contributing, both good and bad.

SEO

1. Blind them with your charm. Pushing your sales angle can put users off. Good search engine optimisation is about the subtle sell.

2. Force them to dance your way. One thing I come across frequently is site design that ignores usability. Unusable design really shouldn’t make it through the SEO process, as cleaning up navigation is one of the most important SEO jobs. Some errors do slip through, though.

3. Step on their feet. It’s important to gauge the level of knowledge that your audience has. All too many businesses publish content that really is below the level of the reader. Don’t assume your users are stupid, and don’t assume they know everything, either.

4. Fail to engage. Sites can fail to engage users in myriad ways, but the main form in SEO terms is badly presented content. If you’re writing about computers in Chester, think about truly interesting content and present it in an easy-to-read way.

5. Don’t call the next day. One major killer for return traffic is failing to respond to overtures from your site users, such as replying to comments or emails. If you catch them, try to keep them.

SEO

There are many types of spam. In search engine optimisation terms, we tend to refer mostly to search engine spam. There are other types for site owners to worry about, however, all of them potentially damaging. Too-frequent emails, unsolicited messages and other underhanded marketing tactics are all spam, and are all equally annoying to consumers. Spamtastic.

This can get you into trouble when you’re trying to build links. Annoyed customers won’t provide you with good reviews or direct links. What’s more, they are likely to recommend to friends that you be left alone. This can be even more damaging in SEO terms than it can in general word-of-mouth losses.

This might sound like an entirely avoidable situation, and it is. The trouble is, most companies don’t connect their marketing tactics with spam. It takes a little common sense. Sending customers daily emails about your Cheshire cheese company might seem like a great way to keep in touch, but when you step back from your own desires you’ll easily see that all you’re doing is filling your customers’ junk mail folders.

Annoying marketing tactics have a nasty way of sticking around on the net. If you’ve ever aimed for ‘spamtastic,’ be warned that it could come back to haunt you.

Those within the SEO industry can seriously learn from Homer. I’ve already talked about those ‘d’oh!’ moments that occur when making changes to websites. There’s another area in which Homer Simpson presents a shining (bad) example: forethought.

Much of the trouble good old Homer gets into could be avoided with some forethought. The same could be said of many things, SEO being a prime example. Many businesses get into trouble because they rush their search engine optimisation, needing results quickly. This leads to clunky content, baldly paid-for linking campaigns, and more than a few desperate black hat techniques.

In hindsight, owners invariably wish that they’d taken the time to plan their search engine optimisation better, saving themselves a lot of clean-up work on their now in-trouble site. Rushing again to fix the mistake, they make even more mistakes.

Whether you’re managing your company’s search engine optimisation plan, or whether you’re running your own agency, you can’t help but know the importance of forethought. Forethought helps to not only avoid those loud and obvious ‘D’oh!’ moments, it helps to avoid the more subtle ones as well. Forethought can help you to intuit trends as they are happening, anticipate the moves of competitors, and generally make your own work much easier.

Try your SEO plan, for one. Some people seem to treat SEO much like they treat the desire to buy an iPhone. Namely, everyone else is doing it, so I want one exactly the same, even though they’re not sure why. This won’t work for SEO.

Everyone is going crazy over iPhones. Everyone… just about. I have, so far, managed to resist the trend. Why? Because I am not an iPhone kind of person. I’ve been pushed to get one, but on closer investigation I’ve found that the things the devices offer just don’t meet my needs.

Every market needs diversity because one thing is not going to work for everyone, no matter how popular it is. This applies to your site and its search engine optimisation. Some of the popular techniques will work well for your site, but this doesn’t mean you should accept an out-of-the-box SEO plan. It is worthwhile examining the tactics on offer and choosing what’s right for you.

Talk to your search engine optimisation company about tactics that are specific to your site. Don’t fall for SEO sales patter from companies who will treat your site like the latest popular model.

SEO

search engine optimisation

This is particularly problematic for small businesses, as they’re more likely to hire the services of one of the smaller breed of SEO companies who promise a personal service for less money – even though they have no more knowledge of SEO than your average Facebook user.

In Ellesmere Port and the surrounding area for example there are a number of small ‘SEO companies’, all proclaiming to know the industry backwards and having years of experience, yet a look at some of the websites shows they don’t. Rather than being experienced in the field of SEO they have instead learned their knowledge from forums and blogs, many of which are themselves full of half truths and myths.

One such company offering SEO in Ellesmere Port features the following meta tag on their own website:

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”30 days” />

What this meta tag is supposed to do is to tell the search engines to return to the website after 30 days in order to index it again, picking up any website updates. The ‘30’ days can be changed to whatever number you wish, depending on how often you want Google and co to visit your website.

However, there’s one small problem with this meta tag… search engines have never used it, and we mean never.

Widely used SEO myth

You see, the met tag itself is a bit of a red herring, a joke on people who claim to know SEO if you will. It has never been used by Google, Yahoo or Bing and never will be. Instead, the met tag was invented by a Canadian based website called Vancouver Webpages – and was used by their own local website called searchBC.

Even Vancouver Webpages doesn’t use the tag anymore and, even if it did, it would only be relevant to websites listed with searchBC, located in British Columbia… not Ellesmere Port, Cheshire.

Many websites claiming to offer SEO advice have posted about this tag, believing it to actually work. Here is a snippet from one such website spreading SEO myths:

“The Revisit META tag defines how often a search engine or spider should come to your website for re-indexing. Often this tag is used for websites that change their content often and on a regular basis. This tag can also be beneficial in boosting your rankings if search engines display results based on the most recent submissions.”

“The Revisit META Tag is used by search engines as a means to indicate how often a web page should be revisited for re-indexing. This tag is supported by many search engines and should be made use of if your content changes on a regular basis.”

This is of course utter nonsense, as the tag is not used, at all. Those people calling themselves SEO professionals who use this tag may even offer an excuse when confronted about saying that it can’t hurt, and some search engines may use it in the future.

This again I’m afraid is nonsense. By using the tag you are adding unnecessary code to your website, giving Google more code to scroll through and reducing the code-text ratio. Also, and most importantly, it will never be used. Why would Google return to a website to re-index it based on the content of a meta tag?

Think about it.

What does Google say about the meta name=”revisit-after” tag?

If you don’t believe us, and some people reading this may not – instead choosing to believe their friendly SEO expert who has never let them down before, then perhaps you’ll believe Google.

To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless <meta name=”revisit-after”> than use the <em> element!

Now, if you see that code in your website as a result of SEO that has been done it shows that your ‘SEO company’ is doing nothing more than groping around blindly in the dark.

This is one of a myriad of common errors and misconceptions spread by people who actually know nothing about SEO, they only think they do. Make sure when you let someone SEO your website that actually do know what they’re doing.

You know the ones I mean. People in IT and SEO certainly know which moments I mean. Those moments such as when you publish your site’s new page and realise that instead of publishing your wonderfully polished new homepage content, you’ve posted your email to your mother, or worse – your girlfriend. Those kinds of moments.

Most search engine optimisation or web design gurus will recommend that you publish any changes on your website in the dead of night. This isn’t just because SEO pros are old-school computer hacks who only come out at night and have coffee mainlined through an IV tube (although this is still a factor). It’s because of the ‘D’oh!‘ moment.

These moments happen to everyone. From the largest, most well-equipped corporation in the world, right down to the most devotedly run solo operation, everyone has those moments when a mistake is made, the wrong thing is posted, and the website suffers for it. Posting major site updates at night means that outright mistakes, broken links and page error messages are given time to test and fix.

Midnight is an inconvenient time to update your website, there’s no doubt about it. But it certainly saves you from making your ‘D’oh!’ moments embarrassingly public.