Hope you enjoy it, feel free to share

Thanks
Mark

The following questions will all be answered by the graphic below:

Number of accounts on Twitter?
Percentage of Twitter traffic originating in the US?
How clever are Twitter users?
How old are Twitter users?
What ethnicity are they?
Are they mostly men or women?

As always thanks for all your comments, especially all those on Twitter. Social Media is here to stay, but if you are in it to expand your business and connect with new clients then don’t put your eggs in one basket, use as many different social platforms as you can.
As always, feel free to comment.

Thanks!

EDIT: The new update is called the ‘Penguin’ update. Panda-monium would have been more appropriate.

There are examples all over the place. (A lot of this will depend on your location) but some of the more common ones are a search for ‘make money online’ is bringing up an empty page at number 1 spot on Google.com and a brand new blog with no content at number 2 spot in the UK.

A search for ‘paypal france’ in the UK brings half a page of Viagra results from position 5 down.

There are tales over the web of legitimate white hat websites (whatever they may be…) getting dumped completely from Google’s search index and replaced by spammy, adsense filled junk sites. I’ve seen movement with my own sites, one site which I had pretty much forgotten about has popped back up into position 1 and made a couple of affiliate sales. And I have to be honest, it’s not a very good site – a built it a few years ago when testing some auto blogging software, built a load of forum links to it and then left it, it was just a test site, now it’s number 1 for its main keyword. Ridiculous.

I think one of the issues with Google is that they don’t do enough manual reviewing, they rely too heavily on their famed algorithm, and this time they have tweaked it far too hard. This has destroyed some businesses, Build My Rank went out of business overnight after the majority of their site was deindexed.

So, what do you think? Do you have examples. good or bad, of rankings changing dramatically? Are Google heading in the right direction, or is this just playing into the hands of Bing et al? Should a search engine be able to wield this sort of power – encouraging businesses to grow for several years and them wiping them out overnight? Would love to hear your constructive thoughts.

Thanks

Ranging from Vladimir Putin’s Zombie Gun to the tuth about Beer Goggles each of these items is completely true

Read the full article here

Plenty of food for thought.

What can and can’t you say on Twitter?

A student who made racially offensive comments about footballer Fabrice Muamba on Twitter has been jailed for 56 days – the latest case where a comment made on social media has landed someone in court.

Read the full article here…

Improve your page layout and your rankings will improve. Nice idea.

Anyway…read the full post here

Thanks

Mark

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Looks like we can expect some more rankings changes in the coming weeks/months – busy times indeed in the SEO world.

I worked for Hewlett Packard for many years as a Business Analyst. I left HP in 2001 and retrained as a Hypnotherapist. As I was always interested in the web and website design I built my own site, using wordpress, and then realised that a site without rankings was of no use whatsoever.

Therefore I spent many hours, plenty of experimentation (including websites that completely failed) and a fair bit of money (information can be pretty expensive) discovering the processes involved in SEO and before too long I was ranking in the top 3 of Google UK for ‘hypnotherapy’ and ‘hypnosis‘. In those early days you could get a top 10 ranking with good on page optimisation and just a handful of incoming links.

Now however the competition is much more fierce for just about every niche, however even though I no longer work on my hypnosis site I am pleased to say it still enjoys page 1 rankings for its main keywords, so it appears that good, strong historical SEO still counts a lot in the SERPS! (SERP – Search Engine Results Page)

Anyway, having had a fair bit of success with my own site a friend of mine asked me to do the same with his local cleaning business, and referrals came from referrals until before I knew it I was running a full time SEO business. So I’ve never had to make a cold call, or send out a sales email or letter as the business has always been there. Referrals are definitely the best way to grow your business!

Some of my clients have now been with me for several years and are rock solid at the top of the rankings.

I think that’s it, told you it would be brief.

Thanks….and if you would like to find out more about my services and how I can help you grow your business then please feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do.

Cheers

Mark

Just some random SEO Tips which may or may not be of interest. Thanks.
Using Search Engine Optimisation To Help Your Business

Understanding how your website’s rank in search engines has an effect on the success of your online site is important. This article includes tips that will help you rise to the top through search engine optimization.

You should know all about SEO before you start your journey. Websites are ranked by search engines based on proprietary algorithms. Read here to learn how to use these formulas to your advantage.

When ranking your website, search engines consider a number of different factors. One of these factors is the keywords found on your site and heading. Your website’s activity is important because search engines use this to rank it.

Your efforts at search engine optimization will be rewarded if you apply yourself with dedication and patience. You should add the keywords you are most concerned with all throughout the content on your site, including headings and page titles. This boosts the relevancy of your website to the search engines. Be open to new SEO ideas to implement, and always afford them enough time to start showing results. It is important to start with patience. Gather all of the information you can find, and put it to good use. Once you decide on the keywords for your site, place them in the text, as well as the titles and headings on your web pages. Doing all this will make your site seem more connected with the keywords and cause the search engine to rate it as more relevant. It is important to dedicate your time and patience if you want to improve your search engine ratings. Use all of the tips and suggestions you can to implement those ideas, and then give them some time to take effect. Once you have figured out which keywords you want to use, put them into your titles, headings and body of your text. This will increase the search engines’ perception of your site’s relevance. It takes time and patience to promote higher rankings on search results pages. Be patient, do your research, and give it time to work. Once you know your site’s primary keywords, you can add them to your text and page headers. This will let the search engines know that your site is about the keywords you chose.

You will not be able to simply pay for better ranking. If you have the money to spare, you can pay to be a featured result or have a sponsored ad, but the cost is usually prohibitive. Although you are guaranteed to show up at the top of the listings using this method, people know that they are sponsored links. The fact that they know they are paid links makes them less likely to click on them. Plus, the larger websites often grab these premium advertising locations.

You can greatly improve your site’s ranking by taking SEO to the next level with linking. Find ways to backlink to your own content, share your links on other websites, and exchange links with others in your niche. Or you can just contact the site owner and ask if you can have a link agreement and share with each other.

To generate profit, it is important to get targeted visitors to your website. Targeted visitors are basically visitors that you are most likely to covert into customers. You will also have plenty of visitors that are just browsers. When you get a random visitor, there is a very slim chance that they will help your business. Getting targeted visitors to your site requires using the proper keywords and advertising on similar websites.

If you are a business owner, you will miss out if you do not have a website. Having a website is great because sometimes your customers may want to purchase items from you online, especially those who are not able to get into your store. Look at your website as something you have to have and give it all the attention it deserves. I hope these SEO tips help in some way.

You do not need to operate your website for long before you get a feel for just how vital it is to get ranked favorably by the search engines. This is important if you want to see an increase in the number of visitors to your site. Read on for some sound advice on how to increase your search engine rating.

To start, you need to realize exactly what SEO is. Search engines use algorithms for determining where your site is ranked for specific keywords. The algorithms used get their data from search engine spiders which crawl all of the websites that are indexed. This is where the point of search engine optimization becomes clear. Search engine optimization manipulates the data that search engine spiders pick up, so your website will receive a higher search engine ranking than it would otherwise.

The position your site reaches on the search engine results page derives from a lot of different concerns. Your site is ranked based on keywords and how much activity your website gets.

Keep working to optimize your site for the engines, even if you aren’t seeing immediate results. Include keywords in titles and subheadings whenever possible. This is a great way to improve your site. Do not forget, though, that this will take time.

Sponsored or featured ads that typically appear above the listings on a SERP can be purchased. However, large corporations are generally the only type of business that can afford them. Most websites do not have the financial resources to pay for these placements.

There is much more to search engine optimization than just dropping word clusters into your website content. You can also get good notice and rankings based on how you link to external sites, link to sections inside of your own page and even more by having external sites backlink to you. Make the most of any associates you have at other websites to seek reciprocal link exchange agreements.

Your sales will come from targeted visitors who find your website. This type of consumer is specifically interested in your product. As a result, he or she will be far more likely to actually make a purchase than someone who has just happened to chance upon your site. Choose keywords that apply to the products and the type of customers you want. You will want to put these ads in places they will be visiting.

Being a business owner means you must do what is necessary to set your business up for success. A website is the best way to garner a wider customer base, so having one for your business is essential. Not all of your customers need to reside near your physical location. In fact, a website makes it easy to expand your customer base to include both those who sometimes come to your physical location, and those who simply purchase online. Either way, you give customers more ways to buy what you are selling. Look at your website as something you have to have and give it all the attention it deserves. You receiving that message is our main purpose, and we hope that your business does well with this newly acquired knowledge.