Twas the night before Caffeine, when all through the net
Billions of searches were happening, but nothing had changed yet.
The SEOs were all staring at each ranking with care,
In hopes that St Google would let them stay there.

Those corporate site bigwigs were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of dollar signs added up in their heads.
But MaAndPa.com worried, that when Caffeine soon unwrapped,
They’d be in for something colder than a long winter’s nap.
(more…)

The concept of Short URLs is wonderful. Instead of very long, multi foldered URLs that can be hard to remember, type in and break in emails, how about a URL with few characters that can be generated in seconds, pasted wherever needed and redirects to the page you want readers to go to. All this and great tracking capabilities to boot. Perfect for today’s world with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and the ever increasing effectiveness of email marketing.

But the fact that thousands of sites can be linked to by the same main URL domain can lead to a trust issue. How do you know if the link will lead to a safe site that really matches the copy that surrounds it? Is it possible that the link is a spam link, and the enticing copy surrounding it is only there to trick you into clicking on it? Does the fact that you don’t know make you more or less likely to click on it?

Even though the majority of Short URLs you come across will indeed be safe and link to a good page, the truth is that it is tough to be 100% sure that what you are clicking on is safe, and will lead directly to where you want to go. And we all know that one bad click can sometimes ruin a good day. So, what are some tips to keep in mind when you come across Short URLs:

• If you trust the sender or poster (like someone you follow on Twitter), you should be okay. But be wary, as some accounts can get hacked and those hackers may spam people associated with those accounts.
• If you think the link may be spam, don’t click on it. If the marketing message entices you, you can probably find out what is being referenced by searching that website.
• Preview the linked page if possible (TinyURL offers this option – http://tinyurl.com/preview.php).

I believe that the need for a service like Short URLs will always be there, but the exact form the future versions of this service will take is yet to be determined. Do you have ideas of what it will look like? Do you have alternatives to Short URLs? Have you run into any huge problems? Let us know.

By now you have been told countless times that you need to have your business on Facebook and Twitter. That’s where the people are. And maybe you have been told that pages and entries on social community sites have slowly crawled into listings on search engine results pages.

And maybe you have put off signing up for an account, or building a fan base, because you were ‘waiting to see what happens.’ Well, it just happened.

Both Google and Microsoft have recently come to agreements with Twitter, while Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook as well (you know Google can’t be too far behind there). These agreements will allow the search engines to integrate updates on the social media sites right onto the SERPs.

You can read more about these deals here.

So what does this mean for you? If you have been at the forefront of social media, and have accounts on Twitter and Facebook with lots of fans and followers, then you are in a good position to gain more exposure (and hopefully traffic) from these deals.

If you have accounts but have not kept them up to date, or if you don’t have any accounts at all, there’s still time but you have some work ahead of you. These deals are about real-time search, so it’s not necessarily what you have done in the past that will count (although having more fans and followers will probably be a plus, so you’ll want to increase those numbers). You can position yourself for real-time search by:

• Opening or updating your account
• Building up more fans or followers
• Starting conversations on current topics
• Respond to comments and other posts on topics you are an expert in

So what type of situation are you in? Are you ready to take advantage of real-time search?

When marketers get a job with a new company, they tend to know at least a little bit about the new employer, but not everything. They may know who the VPs are, but they may not know which ones can get things done. They may know the local restaurants, but they may not know which ones have the best happy hour. They may know the products and services offered, but they may not know which ones make the most profit for the company.

And of course, they probably have seen the website and have half an idea of what they think about it. But what they may not know until they get involved with it, is what shape the website is in (specifically with regards to the search engines). And some times what they find isn’t pretty. (more…)

Are you running out of optimization ideas for your website? Looking for a little bit of inspiration to get you back on track? (we know you’re not, but just in case there’s a brain freeze today we thought we’d ask)

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now: (more…)