Image via Wikipedia

There are no hard rules on Twitter. Just because someone follows you does not mean you have to follow them back.

I tend to be picky about who I follow on Twitter and Facebook. Here are 10 reasons for not following people on Twitter.

1.  Your avatar, (photo), doesn’t exist, is a cartoon character, is half dressed, or is nude. If you haven’t yet bothered to put in an avatar, Twitter shows you as an egg. This tells me you’re either very new, or you don’t care. Using a logo or a cartoon character tells me that you don’t want people to know what you look like. And finally, the only avatars that should be semi-nude, are those people who sell lingerie. I find it very hard to trust people whose avatars are wearing undershirts, bikinis, or other nonprofessional attire. Avatars that are naked women tend to represent spammers, or robots (fake Twitter profiles).

2.  You haven’t tweeted in 30 days or more. Are you still alive? There are a lot of people on Twitter who seem to abandon their Twitter accounts after a month. It is hard to tell this unless you go back and look at their last tweet.

3.  All your tweets are quotes. While quotations are useful in certain situations, if all you’re doing is tweeting somebody else’s words, then you obviously aren’t very interested in talking to others on Twitter.

4.  You have protected your Twitter updates. This shows that you completely miss the point of social media. Social media lets us engage with people and show two sides of the conversation (yours and others). Some people seem to think that protecting ones’ updates equals privacy. This is a fallacy because we can still see your profile.

5.  You use foul language in your profile or tweets, (continuously). Unless you are a third grader, civilized conversations don’t require profanity.

6.  All your tweets are advertisements, you selling something, or spam. This is one of the biggest mistakes made on Twitter. Think of Twitter or any social network as a cocktail party. You wouldn’t go up to the nice-looking girl by the punch bowl and say “You really need to buy my new book about weight loss.” That would probably get you a slap in the face. Instead, what you would actually do is engage the person in conversation, win their trust, and then lead the conversation to something about your new book. Twitter is the same. This includes automatic direct messages (DM). Talk, engage in conversations, and then lead into products.

7.  All of your tweets are forwards (RTs) of other peoples’ tweets. This is the same problem as using all quotations. Where are your thoughts? Or is it that you don’t have anything important to say? This sort of behavior leads people to think that there is no real person behind the Twitter handle.

8.  You tweet the same tweet over and over and over again. This is against Twitter’s guidelines, and again leads to my assumption that you are a bot (robot).

9.  Your profile has nothing on it. You need to give me something to go on, your interests, where you’re located, or what you do. Be careful of the location section of the profile. Writing, “Planet Earth”, or “Everywhere”, is useless to most of us.

10.  And the big one: if you are following more than 10,000 people, (and you’re not @GuyKawasaki, or a celebrity), my assumption is that you’re using one of the automatic Twitter follower programs. I doubt very much that you are following the conversations of all 20,000 people, or even engaging any of them.

Do you remember the Pushmi-pullyu from Hugh Loftings’  original Dr. Doolittle series? This was a two-headed creature, with a head at each end. Facebook and Twitter are very similar to this animal.

Twitter is the “push me”  part of it.  Twitter, Plurk, and other micro-blogging applications push users to click on links. This is due in part to the 140 character limit, and in part to the way many people use micro-blogs.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a pull technology. Once you’re pulled into the website, it never wants to let you go. This is due to the nature of the stickiness of the site, the games that are found there, and the many other nooks and crannies that you can explore there. There are several other social networks that do this as well, but Facebook is the best example of this.

The trick is to use these two types of technology to your best advantage. An example of this would be to use the micro-blogs to push people to your Facebook page (the former “fan page”), and then make that Facebook page as sticky as possible. Finding the right balance can be hard. What you don’t want to do, is to create only a Facebook page, and no website for the user to ultimately end up on. Again, going back to a previous post, social media is transient in nature. Whatever pages you create on social networks may not be there in the future, or may become inaccessible. So, my advice to you is to cover all your bases.

I have been noticing a worrisome trend lately. Many businesses have decided to  go with social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) before making sure that 1) their website is fully optimized for users (or search engines), or 2) that their website is fully functional.

While I agree that using social media is a very useful technique for pushing people to a website, there needs to be a fully usable website on the other end. There is nothing so frustrating as following a link in Twitter, only to discover that the information you’re interested in can’t be found on that particular page.

Another problem is that social media is transient in its very nature. What is popular today may not be popular tomorrow. You must make sure that your website will be found by people who are not only active in social media, but who are looking for your site in the search engines using particular keywords.

Before you jump on the social media bandwagon, you must make sure that your website is not only user-friendly, but search engine friendly as well. Optimizing your website is crucial for the long term. I know, I know, doing SEO on your website is not as exciting as posting to your friends on Twitter, but think of it as a necessity, as a way of standing out in the crowd of websites.

A good way of getting more keywords on a website is to put together a glossary of terms. This has two main advantages.

First, by putting in a list of definitions, you make the website more of a content site, and one that will be seen for information. It is a great service to your customers and prospects as well.

A great example of this is Grand Entrances .  I helped set up this glossary of terms about doors (and learned a lot while doing it). Now, when customers come to the website, they can better understand what the descriptions are referring to.

Secondly,  a glossary allows you to pinpoint the keywords that you want the search engines and users to see. Often, a website has too many keywords to be clumped together on the home page. With a list of terms, you can both inform and educate.

In order to rank well on the search engines, you need to have other websites pointing to your website. These are known as inbound links. There are a number of ways of getting inbound links to your site, and several older techniques that are no longer very useful.

One of these older techniques is known as a link exchange. Link exchanges are when a number of different websites agree to exchange links. Nowadays, this method only works if you can find related websites to your subject that do not compete with you.

In other words, if you are selling furniture online, you would welcome links from websites selling furniture polish or soap, since they are not competing with you. However, if your website is about pets, you would not want a website selling animal traps to link to you.

The best way to get inbound links is to use search engines to find popular websites that are in your general field. You can then ask for a return link. I suggest emailing the webmaster for the link, using your own words, not some canned program.

Keep in mind that you do not want a lot of links all at once. That will look suspicious to the search engines. Gradual link building is best.

Image via Wikipedia

There is currently a discussion on MyVirtualPowerForum about Google being evil. This was my first response to the discussion.

While I do not consider Google “evil” (I reserve that label for the really bad things in life), I do think that they are the big bully on the block.

For all the reasons given here and more, Google has decided that it is the search engine “God”, and whatever it decides goes.

Well, this only works if your SEO person only optimizes your website for Google. I have never followed this method because it puts you at the mercy of them. There are many techniques (especially now with social marketing) around the monolith of Google.

What I find funny is when Google spokespeople openly lie (IMHO), and all these SEO discussion forums obediently fall in line with the supposed policy. An example was the pronouncement from on high (Matt Cutts) that Google does not consider “.gov” or “.edu” sites to be authoritative. What pure nonsense!

Another stupid comment from them was that they no longer use inbound links from directories. Yeah, right.

Google’s biggest, and ongoing lie (IMHO) is their use of PageRank. The supposed PR that you see people claiming that their site ranks for is useless. First of all, the term PageRank, is named for Larry Page, not after a web page. Secondly, the PR you can see on the Google Toolbar is not what Google is using. What Google is using is a trade secret.

And finally, PR is not important in the bigger picture. What is important is where your site ranks in the organic results on any search engine, and where it appears for the keywords that you want it to appear for.

Image by mringlein via Flickr

I gave a talk recently to my SEO Meetup about the 10 biggest SEO Mistakes. I discovered that there are way more than just 10, so I grouped them into three basic sections: Web Design; Title and Meta Tags; and Linking.

Of course the absolute BIGGEST mistake is not to do SEO at all, but I presume that you already know that.

Web Design

DON’T

Put a splash or doorway page on the website. This is a page with no text that a user has to click on to enter the actual website. We have all seen this, there is a big graphic, or a Flash movie, and a small “Skip Intro” button at the bottom somewhere. Why upset your users when they come in to the website? Remember, you only have 7 seconds to grab their attention.

Use frames on the site. An example is a website that is cut into boxes where the text scrolls down but the design stays put. This includes I-Frames. Fortunately, most designers no longer fool with frames, but i-Frames are just as bad. Try printing out a web page that has frames and you will get two blank pages and one of text. Which one will the search engine see? The blank ones.

Have a Flash movie on the first page. Most search engines cannot see Flash, and will not index your website as a result. Even though Adobe supposedly gave Yahoo and Google information on Flash, the programs cannot see your images. However, you can embed the Flash video in a static HTML page. This allows the search engine to index the page and your users still can see the lovely movie.

Use graphics with text in them (i.e. like a page header with your tagline in it). Again, search engines cannot see graphics and will miss the important data.

Have a lot of flashing and blinking animations on your website. This is distracting to the user and “so last century”.

Please do not try fancy navigation buttons. These often lead to confusing both the users and the spiders. You want to have straightforward, easy to read / see navigation links throughout the website.

DO

Have at least a paragraph of text on the first (or home) page. This allows the search engines to properly classify the site and helps the users as well (7 second rule).

Have your contact information at the bottom of each page or in a visible location (such as a Contact Us page). This boosts credibility.

Use your most important key terms in the text of the pages, so that the search engines and your prospective clients can find you.

Make sure that the navigation of the website is clear and simple to use. If a user cannot navigate your site, they will leave.

Make sure that there are no broken links on the website. This means checking back every few months.

Part 2 will cover Linking.

Image by jlori via Flickr

As the economic crisis continues, more layoffs are being announced everyday in the tech industry. Zillow (real estate) just laid off 35 people, hi5 (a social network) let go 10-15, Adbrite (advertising online) dropped 40, and even eBay downsized 1500 peeps.

Yet i still see many notices for in-house SEO jobs. Why? Most companies do not need someone on staff to handle SEO or SEM. Most of the work is in the first two months and after that it tends to be monitoring the rankings, meta tags and ad campaigns.

Look at all the advantages of hiring a 1099 contractor. The company does not need to pay any benefits; the person works from home so they are saving gas and not polluting; the rate can be by the hour or a fixed number of hours rather then by year; the list goes on and on.

Someone needs to clue in these folks that in-house is no longer the way to go for search engine optimization.

Cool! My client, Ferrari Productions, just won both the San Diego Reader’s Poll and the US Local Small Business Awards for best video production company in San Diego!

Ferrari Productions

It is really fascinating to watch the deployment and preparations for Gustav from my computer. Twitter allows me to follow CNN reporters, disaster doctors “tweeting”, people on the ground, and the various emergency networks coming together online. Several new networks such as one on Ning.com and others are being set up and people are being asked to pass the word to the “non-geeks” as well.