We’ve all kind of noticed that retweets of our articles seem to have dropped off lately. And yet we’re still writing blindingly incisive humourous and topical content with no discernable drop in daily traffic. Sometimes.
Odd.
On one level it hardly matters, but there’s no denying that the Tweetmeme counter up there adds something to the way people respond to a post. If you go somewhere and the first thing you see is a big notice that this post has been retweeted 129 times then you immediately assume that it has to be pretty interesting and will dive into the post. It’s one of the reasons we don’t generally recommend using the tweetmeme counter on commercial properties – because nothing says “fail” more than post after post with 0 tweets, fair or not.
Now by all evidence, Twitter is still the office-waste-of-time du jour, so we started to poke around in the undergrowth to figure out what was behind this drop. Dave won’t give me his Twitter password (for some reason) so I’m using my own paltry feed for this example but it should illustrate the problem…
So the ‘retweet this to your followers’ feature that Twitter introduced a month or two ago disconnects the tweets from the stats. We don’t know why this is, but the favourite explanation is that it is down to the loss of the @ symbol – without that, the retweet count is somehow getting lost. In other words Tweetmeme is only counting retweets done in the old fashioned “@davenaylor” way and ignoring the crazy new-fangled “retweet this” button which all the pop kids are using.
Similarly, we’re divided as to who to blame. Twitter have changed part of their formula when they introduced this feature so it’s half their fault, but shouldn’t Tweetmeme be able to access the right data through the API?
Either way, we know for sure that we get more retweets than are showing up up there so we either have to look for an alternative to Tweetmeme or hope that Twitter get their shit together (we don’t hold out much hope for Twitter – the exploit we found in August last year was still working recntly.) Anyone else seeing this problem?
(P.S. Dave was going to write this post but his rage got the better of him so we dragged him away from the keyboard)
No stupid gimmicks like “follow us on Twitter” or “buy us a beer” or anything – we just happen to have a spare copy of the brand new 2nd edition of Brian Clifton’s superb Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics lying around the office and we’ve decided to give it away.
If you fancy getting a copy of this indispensable book, then all you have to do is leave a insightful comment, uproarious joke or embarrassingly personal plea below. The one that makes the office laugh or think or pity you the most gets the book – it’s that simple. In case you don’t know much about the book, we reviewed it earlier in the month here and are generally agreed that it’s the best book on the subject on pretty much any level.
And as if that wasn’t enough to make you wet your pants like a six year old, then there’s also a $25 Google AdWords voucher stapled inside the front cover – that’s $25 dollars worth of visitors for you to analyse in fine-grain detail with the help of your new book, which pretty much makes the winner officially King Of The Internets.
We think this is the greatest free giveaway in history ever, so knock yourself out in the comments below and we’ll announce the winner as soon as someone says something funny enough.
Ok it’s most probably too early to tell but all the signals to me, is that it’s going be a long haul for Google. Today while hopping around sites I fell onto mashable, this thing that hit me was :
ok the message is plain and simple to me Mashable really want you to BUZZ their conent, but is it working ..
653 Tweets to 5 Buzzers that’s what would class as very very disappointing from Googles point of view, also add into the factor the readership of Mashable, they are a social media site !
then look at the following :
conclusion if Mashable can’t get users what chance do we have !
A while ago there was a severe lack of SEO based tools for any Android based mobile phones. Since I use a HTC Hero it was a manual job for checking keywords if I only had my mobile to hand.
I’ve had a quick look on the Android market today and there are about four tools that offer varying things from Google PR & Yahoo! Site Explorer.
If you only want a rank check then SEO Rank Pro is the App for you and better still it’s free. It gives you access to use varying Google searches from .com and .co.uk to co.nz and .com.au
Setup is easy all you need to do is put in your list of keywords in separated by a comma, select the Google you wish to rank check in, enter the site to rank check for and then tap on Check Position.
Dependant on Internet connection speed and number of keywords your result is returned quickly. If your keywords are slightly longer like some of mine below the app looks better in a landscape mode.
SEO Rank Pro is great and a big thanks to Sam Tilson for the time and effort he’s put into it.
The only things that could be improved on is an auto rotate for the results and an option to save the keywords, as once you exit SEO Rank Pro your data is lost.
I have wanted for quite some time to write this post but just never got around to it so here we go. Side note before we start I don’t handle the pricing in my company (Becky does), in fact I don’t really know how much a client pays, I don’t need to. I do this to win and if I have done my job before we start then I should never need to know the billed amount.
OK, we don’t have a minimum monthly fee, we have a client expectation to a return on investment value, and this is how I have always worked. If the retainer is too small we find it hard to make a positive return on the clients investment, in fact we both could lose money on the deal. If everything goes right and I identify the competition correctly, the ROI graph looks something like this. The pink area is the bit I need to get out of quickly, it’s the amount above the retainer we have to do in the early months for things like analysis, content, man hours and implementation.
The blue line is Bronco output and the green is the client ROI. We accept in the early months we both lose money I can’t just flick a switch and traffic turns up, that’s not the way these things work, but a client can really mess the whole process up by not moving quickly enough with the changes we need so if everything goes according to plan, we see this:
If I get it wrong or the client is way too slow at moving forward, and it happens, I’m losing money in fact we both never get a return, of course if this was a 3 year contract we might start seeing profit but that’s something I wouldn’t want to enter into. Now the graph below maybe due to a too low retainer it just means I can’t spend the time needed or buy in all the data i need to get a win, it just drags on and on .. unhappy SEO and unhappy client
But what’s worst than that is if I over charge, now this seems an odd statement but roll back to the top of this post where I said “we have a client expectation to a return on investment value” if I ever see a graph like the one below I have got it wrong simple as, I have over charged they will have the rankings they wanted but are paying over the top so they never get a good ROI and I end up with an embarrassing bag of cash you would think it wouldn’t bother me but it does!
My all time favourite is the quick win I don’t actually make any more money from it I still have to produce the reports, buy the data etc but when it happens it looks like this
Like most things that happen here in the Bronco office, it all started with a SERP:
What’s going on there then? A quick investigation of mi.o2.ie shows some badly formatted HTML and an error message about O2’s mobile internet service. Predictably, the domain is listed as belonging to O2 Ireland. So why have they got a scraped version of one of our blog posts? There’s nothing particularly remarkable about that post (sorry Dave) over the others – so what happens if you change the URL?
I’ll cut a long story short and just explain the results – http://mi.o2.ie/www.anywhere.com/somepage will work and return the contents of www.anywhere.com/somepage. It’s even helpful enough to alter redirects (try http://mi.o2.ie/www.google.com) and rewrite any links on the page to keep you within the mi.o2.ie structure. Search engine crawlers must love that.
Worst still: it’s a fairly effective anonymous proxy. It sends a HTTP_VIA header along to the remote server containing “1.1 mi.o2.ie” but contains no reference at all to your own IP address. Browse with this and no-one will know who you are. As long as you turn off images. And Javascript. And maybe CSS.
Ok, so maybe it’s not that useful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google get a fair few PageRank requests through from O2 Ireland though.
At the time of writing, site:mi.o2.ie on Google returns “about 573,000″ results. Ouch. Does anyone know how long this has been running for?
Wow .. No WOW what a day in my life! I don’t tend to get nervous these days as I have spoken at so many conferences now it’s almost like going to the pub, you know that some place comfortable but you don’t quite know who you’re going to meet or how the nights going to turn out, so to speak , well today I was well out of my comfort zone and this is why.
A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on Sky News, there’s me thinking that I‘m UK SEO and that the show would be search related or something, I was wrong it was the 7 – 7:30pm slot with Martin Stanford. The show covers the hot stories from around the web from that day and I would get the stories in the morning via email, then I would read them and just repeat them as I see it .. easy you think ok so here are my 5 stories ..
After a prospective client meeting I headed over to the Hilton for a bite to eat and a little research, then it all started with Ant in the office laughing and saying I was screwed, think about it what did I really know about these stories and would or could I have an opinion on any of these. The Twitter story was easy I could talk about twitter all day long, the city workers I had to remember 2 things really 23% uplift and a recent study that said that we need more Male Role Models in school. Two down and I’m on fire, more latte for me! , then comes the shady deed story which is basically a study by (first problem) Psychological Science, psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Vanessa Bohns if you could have seen my face I jumped on IM to Becky to ask, how do you say Zhong .. zed hong or zee hong ?? Help, but the answer that came back didn’t really help me…isn’t the h silent so it would be Zong, OMG I can’t even say “Psychological Science, psychologists”.
I’m screwed, 10 minutes or so passed while I looked at my laptop with fear in my eyes. Ok I will just move on to story 4,OMG again some deputy has only gone and locked himself in a cell and tried to shoot his way out.. I had a proper LOL in the Hilton bar! The final story Depp’s sex scene with Angelina Jolie upset Johnny Depp’s partner and wants him to quit the movie.
With a few minutes I have scribbled a few notes in my Moleskine notepad and pretty happy I have covered stories 1 and 2 I skip past 3 if it wasn’t even there J and get onto story 4 when I get a IM from James in the office. Me and Tim (xbox buddy) have decided you need to get bell end into the Sky News thing tonight. I laughed and joked for a while with James and came up with a line I could use “of all the things the deputy could do like shout for help or use his mobile to give his colleagues a quick bell, ends up trying to shoot his way out”. We laughed some more, ok now I have a new problem every time I start thinking about the deputy I keep saying “to give his colleagues a quick bellend” now what started at best as schoolboy humour is a real problem even though I don’t what to say bellend I can’t help myself !!
Great 4 stories down one I’m ignoring and the other I keep adding bellend into the summary for no reason. Ok the Depp and Jolie story I keep thinking to myself if I say “hey Vanessa, get over yourself, Depp is no Brad Pitt baby” would I come over as unprofessional, Angelina did meet Brad on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith lol or would I just sound like Perez I have no friends Hilton ( see done it again ) Must stay focussed and professional, and sober.
The next hour goes quite quickly, I work out what I’m going to say and even how to handle tricky story 3, pretty much got it sussed now. My driver collects me and makes for an interesting journey across London at one time it looked like I was going to be late! But the friendly banter and his advice soon cleared my mind of what was to come.. no it really cleared my mind all I could remember was “Bellend” and “Depp is no Brad Pitt” cheers driver. I arrive at the Sky News studio exactly at 6:45pm, exactly the time I was supposed to be, winner things are going right whoa, though security and escorted to the green room. My expectation was some official looking person saying, Hi Mr Naylor I just need you to read and sign these disclaimers, here are few pointers avoid this etc etc ..
What happened was
Pretty Girl : Hello, you David?
Me :Yes ( smiles don’t show your fear!)
Pretty Girl : Would you like a drink?
Me : Coffee would be nice ( pretty girl walks off )
1 min later I get escorted to makeup… hmmm 5 mins later I leave makeup with my coffee..
Back in the Green rooming chatting with other guests on the show then without warning I’m in the studio watching Martin strut his stuff, I quickly grab my Moleskine ( bloody driver I think to myself then bellend ) I start to run though my notes then a gentleman attaches microphone and offers me water. I don’t need water I’ve had coffee ( another mistake ) then points to a chair that he will position in camera shot and if I could quietly follow him at the right time we are good to go..
STOP.. What happened to the form signings the guidance, the don’t do this don’t do that talk. WHAT the hell am I doing here, why is my mouth so dry, where the hell is he taking the chair why didn’t I take the bloody water ..
We are live am I really on the telly.. watch this youtube video for how this story ends
In a couple of weeks I will be heading out to New York with Becky to attend and speak at SES New York. New York is one of my favourite SES conferences to attend and this year promised to be another great show.
The Search Engine Strategies conference runs from Tuesday 23rd March to Thursday 25th and I am doing 3 sessions.
On the Tuesday 23rd I will be starting the conference off with an Express Clinic in the Expo Hall between 4pm and 5pm, so if you want me to go over your site then pop along.
On Day 2 I will be speaking on the “SEO Super Tools” panel, alongside Dave Snyder, Dixon Jones, Bruce Clay and Wil Reynolds at 5pm. Ever since I started doing SEO we have always built our own tools in house. We have used off the shelf packages but found that they never did everything you needed. So to me it’s more effective to get my programmers to create the perfect SEO tool. Also it means that I can keep all of my own data safe! In the session I will be discussing some of my favourite and most useful SEO tools that are available to all, as well as some of the things my secret tools do.
Following that session we will be heading to the bar area for the White Hat / Black Hat Unconferenced for a more informal discussion about SEO. The session promises to be a really open discussion and this will be a unique event for SES New York.
On Day 3 at 2.15pm I will be doing the Big Sites & Big Brands Site Clinic with Kristjan Mar Hauksson. This is always an interesting session as big brands are great at getting brand awareness but often they struggle to get their SEO and organic rankings right. This will be an interactive session where we will appraise the SEO live.
So if you are planning on going to a search conference this year then try SES New York .. and if you are already booked to go then I’ll see you there.
David Naylor, more commonly known as DaveN, started working in the SEO industry over 10 years ago with three major corporations releasing their database driven data, creating internal link structures and improving usability.
