About a year ago, Twitter instituted a no follow policy for all of the links on the site. Every link on Twitter is prevented from passing along the SEO juice to the sites it links to. Whether you believe that Twitter did this to curb spam on the system, or that they just cowed to Google’s demands, the change effectively negated much of the SEO usefulness of twitter from a link building perspective. Having your tweet passed along to 100,000 followers no longer has the effect of drastically increasing search engine placement.
Is Twitter Still a Useful SEO Tool?
So that leaves us with an interesting dilemma, should we scrap Twitter altogether from our SEO tool bag, or is it still a useful part of the conversation?
The Power of the Pyramid
The power of Twitter has always been in the pyramid effect of Twitter’s follower system. If I have 40 followers, and they each have 40 followers, and they each have 40 followers, the information quickly gets multiplied across 10’s of thousands of accounts. Even if this no longer has the effect of creating 64,000 incoming links to your site, it still puts your thoughts and articles in the hands of thousands of people.
Remember, the goal is to be a useful part of the conversation and SEO prominence rises out of that goal. If we publish good articles and people tweet them, they will find your site. Twitter still drives traffic, even if it doesn’t have the secondary effect of driving traffic through Google.
The Alternative Search Engine
Twitter is starting to bill itself as an alternative search engine. The new Twitter home page features the most popular topics by the minute and a very prominent search bar. A Twitter search is different from a Google search. A Google search is about long term relevance: Who’s the closest chiropractor, or who sells inexpensive silver jewelry. People are searching Twitter for a very timely type of relevance i.e. is it hot now? Jay-Z, Neil Patrick Harris, and Mad Men crowd the front page.
For a certain kind of fashionable product or of-the-moment star, a #1 Twitter search ranking may be more valuable than a #1 Google rank. Twitter the search engine can drive real organic traffic to your site and you may find that traffic from Twitter converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google. Analytics may tell you to dump Google SEO altogether and spend your days on Twitter.
It’s a New Idea, So It Has to Be Good
Twitter, like many new technologies, hasn’t found a final resting place yet. Most of us in the internet community recognize that Twitter is important because lots and lots of people are using it. Businesses are tweeting, grandmas are tweeting, Steven Colbert is … well, he’s doing it too. There’s a danger in jumping on the bandwagon of all new internet technologies, but we’re pretty sure this one is going to be around for some time. As it evolves, it’s more useful to be part of the conversation than start fresh from scratch. Set up a Twitter account. Make a new post for every article you write. Collect some followers and see what happens. The rest of us are waiting to see too.
Don’t Forget to Subscribe by RSS or Email:
Much of this blog is dedicated to driving traffic to your site. But there’s another really important part of the equation: Conversion Rate. Making money online is defined by this equation:
Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you lots of important information about your site including different sources of traffic, where they’re clicking, when they’re leaving, and conversion rates. It’s very easy to set up (all you have to do is cut and paste some JavaScript into your web pages).
A heat map is one of the most useful ways to understand how users are looking at your pages. Remember the way the Predator found Arnold Schwarzenegger in the jungle? It’s kind of like that for web pages. You can see exactly where your users are hovering with the mouse and where they’re clicking on your page. The more users that hover and click on a certain link, the hotter the map looks over that one spot.
This is extremely useful information because you can start to understand how your users think. If most of your users are hovering over the menu and then choosing a link at the very bottom of the menu, it may make sense to move that link to a more prominent place at the top. If your users aren’t scrolling down to your offer at the bottom of the page, consider how you can move it above the fold.
Steve Krug wrote an incredible guide to Usability called 
What can you do with all of this great feedback? Well, the most useful thing to do is start testing different ideas. Luckily, the brilliant engineers at Google came up with a free tool to test different pages on your site (aren’t you glad they’re spending so much money on us).
The new Dan Brown bestseller came out last week. “The Lost Symbol” managed to break nearly everyone’s one-day publishing record for adult fiction selling millions of copies in the first 24 hours.
As a result, most authors are given first-time contracts that amount to a tiny percent of book sales and many well known authors barely make ends meet.
Getting Real is a fantastic little book about speed to market, written by the guys at 37Signals. These are the programmers who developed Ruby on Rails and Basecamp Project Management Software. Getting Real was published as a downloadable e-book and later as a physical copy. The company offered a great deal on a 10-pack of books to be freely distributed to friends.
Getting Real’s financial success was because of its self-published electronic model, but its popularity was because it was directed at an audience that 37Signals had already cultivated using all of the marketing tactics that we describe in this blog. They built an audience by being part of the development community. They created and distributed free software tools, they wrote a very compelling blog about fast-to-market development, and they build an army of followers who cared deeply about the conversation.
37Signals also wasn’t afraid to give things away. The first 4 chapters of the book were freely available online. Later, they let you read the whole book online. They understood the law of reciprocity, “give me something and I’ll return the favor.”
Finally, 37Signals created a book worth talking about and sharing. They came up with a novel idea to sell 10 packs of the books for $49 that lent itself well to people forwarding the book to friends and colleagues.
Zappos.com built one of the fastest growing brands on the web by dedicating themselves to customer service. The company is run by people who are obsessed by shoes. They translate that passion into incredible customer service. They have an incredible return policy. They have wonderful live people to talk with about your order. They’ll sometimes even throw in free overnight shipping to make you feel special.
The greeting card business has always been a tough business. You have to manage huge inventory costs and most card purchases are spontaneous, so your brick and mortar location is very important. SendOutCards.com found a great way to serve customers online. They’ll use your handwriting as a font to deliver custom cards anywhere. They serve customers through a subscription service, encouraging people to send cards more often.
Be the biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. Being remarkable isn’t a formula, but if you pay attention to your competition and constantly think about how to turn that business on its head, you’ll find a niche.
Now I Have the Info, Now What?
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good. – From the New York Times article A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality
Every year Gallup does a poll to rank the greatest to least ethical professions. Nurses and Teachers score pretty high on the ethics meter, and Insurance Salesmen and HMO Managers battle for bottom ranks. Imagine if there were a category for Professional Spammer. Even the Car Salesmen couldn’t compete with that. In fact, Professional Spammers are so hated, that almost no one would ever describe themselves that way.
The opposite of spam is being useful to the conversation. If it’s a forum about building a better pumpkin catapult, write an article that shows off some of that physics you took. If someone has a Facebook group dedicated to entrepreneurship, share some of your hard-won wisdom.
Have you ever walked into a store, tried on a pair of pants and then come back a few days later to finally get them? Sometimes we make an impulse purchase, but we’re all much more likely to contemplate a purchase for hours, or days, or sometimes months before we commit. We’re all taught things like “It’s better to look before you leap.”
The next goal is to tip prospective clients from one phase to the next. If someone has just arrived at your site, they’re most likely in Step 2 or Step 3 of the process. This is good news, because you can tailor your copy to those two mentalities:
Often when people make the decision to buy, it’s a fleeting thought that lasts only for a second. Think back to that example when you bought the pants. When did you actually make the decision to buy? How long between the decision and the actual purchase?
The most important part of any online campaign is the call to action. A call to action is a simple request for your audience to take the next step. The easiest thing to do is use a “Buy Now” button, but you’re probably losing out on a lot of conversions if all you’re doing is asking people to buy. Other calls to action are:
If you’re anything like me, you probably skipped ½ the words in this article. You probably read the bullet points and the bold-texted headline and subheads. That’s because we’re all accustomed to skimming content online. Because we treat your landing page content like a magazine or a newspaper, here are a couple simple things you can do to make sure people take the next action:
Look at your design without any words and ask yourself: “Would I still buy this?” Great design can tell the story all alone. Here are a few design tips:
In his brilliant book The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris talks at length about how to build a fully automated business in a few weeks. Since he wrote the book a few years ago, the tools have become even more efficient and powerful. Let’s discuss how you can build a complete business in a weekend.
Pick a product with decent margins and preferably in the $100-1000 range. This makes the financials much easier to work with. The best products are intellectual property that can’t easily be copied, like an e-book or a DVD package that you created. Take a look around on Clickbank.com or other affiliate programs for a product that fits your market. The goal is to be at a 4x to 5x mark up to maximize your profits.
There’s a new tool we’ve been playing with for a few months. SquareSpace.com lets you build a complete website in literally a few minutes. It comes with all the tools you’d need:
Run Google Adwords for a few weeks and start to gather some data. You’ll get a good idea if your product works or not. There are tons of resources on this site on how to improve a PPC campaign, get better conversion rates, and boost traffic. But the most important thing is to get started right away.
