If you are aware of Twitter you may think is is a great opportunity but how can you get off the ground.  This is the usual problem in internet marketing,  if you are famous you can continue to be famous.  If you are starting out you will find it hard to get off the bottom of the pile.

If you have a look at this post called Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey you can read how you can remove all the pain and effort by using a Greasemonkey script that they have developed to automate your Twitter posting.

The author states that ”

After you’ve followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We’ve found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren’t mutual. If they’re not in to you, then it’s time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers. After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I’m coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I’m no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!  ”

I haven’t tried this yet but it looks well worth a shot.

Squidoo participation can bring great benefits for very little outlay have you claimed your opportunity yet?

For those that do not know Squidoo is a communal website which allows you to

• develop your own web page on any topic
• incorporate affiliate and Ebay / Amazon links
• keep the profits or share them with a Squidoo charity

Perhaps the greatest opportunity flows from the excellent search engine rankings enjoyed by the Squidoo site and some of the main pages. Whilst Page Rank is not everything, the home page of the Squidoo site is a PR6. Where else can you put your own web pages into a PR6 site?

Many fast moving Internet Marketers have been claiming their land in the web real estate rush. The land grab is really a url grab … as the pages you develop are on the Squidoo main domain and hence a page url can only be used once and will have one ‘owner’.

Some examples we have seen of developing Squidoo lenses as they are termed are: -

1. A lens focusing on boilers and explaining the different types of boiler available, combi boilers, regular and system types and links to the best selling boilers currently

2. A full coverage of the British Gas Homecare product range covering boiler maintenance and repair, central heating system maintenance, plumbing, drains and electrical care.

If you have any aspirations to become an Internet Marketer you need to develop your online real estate and Squidoo is a free first step you should consider. The site is easy to use and has guides to help the first timer together with a friendly, growing community.

The structure of a site can impact on the pagerank of individual pages and this article tries to illustrate the concepts behind this and the importance of Link Popularity.

Pagerank was defined in the original Google article as

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))  where d is a dampening factor commonly believed to be 0.85.

So pagerank of page A is 0.15 plus a little bit of the pagerank of each page that links to it ( this share relates to the pagerank of the linking page divided by the number of outbound links on the page).

Thinking of this it can be seen that:-

• adding pages increases the total potential pagerank of a site
• inbound links increase the total pagerank within a site
• pagerank can be distributed around the site by changing the linking structure to funnel it to important pages
• poor linking structures can prevent a site achieving its maximum potential aggregated pagerank as some links are not established
• the allocation of pagerank can leak out of a site when it links outwards (unless using the rel=nofollow tag )

Accordingly it is important to consider the structure of a site and ensure that pagerank is shepherded to the important pages in the site.  In this way they will have higher pagerank and a better ranking in the search engine index.

Some other points to note are

• Pagerank goes from 1 to 10
• the increase is probably logarithmic
• pages with no links to them are classed as orphans by Google and excluded from the pagerank calculations which are iterative

There is an excellent, but complicated, article on this at http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Googles latest algorithm and infrastructure updates, known as Big Daddy, have been causing waves on the Internet and complete confusion as to what the changes mean.

Matt Cutts, a senior Google search engineer, has now clarified all in an article on his blog.  It is very long and has resulted in a great deal of response comment. To save you reading it I can summarise the main points here.

The Big Daddy update is complete.

Google is intentionally crawling more pages from a site than they will index.

Make your site functionally correct before emphasising link building. Check - are all of my pages reachable with a text browser from a root page without going through exotic code. Try having a site map on your site. After you’re site is crawlable, then work on the HOOK (content) that makes your site interesting/useful and attracts links.

Make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.

Links are now very, very important.

Reciprocal links are declining in value.  The quality and relevance of inbound links is more important.

Affiliate Out Bound Links are not helping crawling and indexing. There is some speculation that an abundance of affiliate OBLs is now having a negative effect on rankings.

The best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links.

The supplemental index is a back fill for the main index, used when insufficient relevant entries exist in the main index.

The supplemental results are typically refreshed less often than the main results

If your site does not have many inbound links it may not make it into the main index, it certainly will be crawled less and could exist only in the supplemental index.

The message is very clear.  Sites must try harder to develop quality inbound links.

Prepare for the future and develop an effective and targeted link building program now or face the prospect of living without Google search traffic.

When running Link Popularity reviews for clients I often see blogger sites appearing in the links to competitors sites.

The parent site has a page rank of 9 although the blog sites it spawns have lower rank with pages starting at 0 like every other site.

I wondered whether this was a valuable Search Engine Optimisation tactic or an opportunity that could not be followed through. Whilst it is easy to open a blogger blog all the usual site M.I. is missing. You do not know when googlebot visits and what pages are being crawled.

The only way to answer the question is to experiment and observe so the account was opened last week.

The site is up and running and called Selected internet sites to give some element of respectability.

If you were wondering what the purpose of this article was I will tell you. This site gets crawled regularly by googlebot so this article contains a link to the Selected internet sites to send it to the blogger account and force it to index the site.

After that I will start experimenting with links from the blogger account to other sites I own to check the value of the link popularity.

Link popularity flows from the number and quality of sites that link to you. The link value can be further enhanced by the anchor text used and the use of keywords in the anchor text is better still.

Insertion of your url in comments and trackback is regularly suggested for link popularity improvement in the blog world but I fear that this is out of date advice.

Following previous abuse of this opportunity Read the rest of this entry »

Link popularity is a measure of how many sites link to your site. This positively influences your search engine ranking in the natural search results.

So the question is how can you encourage other sites to link to you?

If you have a site with rich functionality and excellent content this may happen naturally but when you start out you have no online status and hence no queue of sites wanting to link to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Link Building is a very important part of developing a good ranking position in search engines. It is also an area that many website owners are not aware of or do not fully understand how it works.

In addition to developing links it is important to demonstrate a gradual increase in links over time. Launching a site with hundreds of links or suddenly increasing the link volume can Read the rest of this entry »