If you're a small business owner, you're probably like most of my SEO clients and are scratching your head saying, "What is this Twitter business all about?  Why is Twitter important for me?" On top of that, you may just flat our refuse to believe that Twitter and other types of social media marketing could actually benefit your business.  In most cases, using Twitter to market your business will work miracles - if done correctly.

Here are 5 of the most important ideas to keep in mind with working with Twitter.

1. Get TweetDeck!

This is probably the most important step in marketing with Twitter.  Download TweetDeck, which is a free program that lets you see and interact with other users' Tweets and activity.  This is the most important step in starting your Twitter marketing - listening.

A couple weeks ago, I attended SES West in San Diego and had the opportunity to have lunch with the Product Manager for Microsoft AdCenter - the head honcho of Bing's PPC program.  Sitting between myself and Saleel was a very obnoxious SEO who worked at some sort of online car dealership website. I was stoked that I could sit down with Saleel and learn a lot from him - I was excited to learn about Microsoft and AdCenter in a way I've never had the chance before.  I wanted to listen to what Saleel had to say and learn from him and his experience.

But Sal wouldn't shut his mouth for 2 seconds.

He spent the entire time talking about himself, his company, his SEO work, blah, blah, blah.  I was about 5 seconds away from saying, "Shut up, Sal, we have a great opportunity to learn from a very experienced guy here.  Shut your mouth and listen!"  I held my tongue though, and fortunately did get some great information from Saleel, including some insight into Bing's new Intellectual Property Rights policy.

One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make on Twitter is having a failure to listen.

2. Use Tweetdeck to always have an ear out for potential customers - listen to them.

I've seen some wildly successful businesses use some great Twitter marketing techniques - from Zappos to Amazon.com, and one of my favorites - GovLiquidation.  They have a great Twitter campaign.  (And I just love that site and all the neat stuff you can buy cheap!)  Every successful Twitter campaign has one thing in common - its starts with listening first.

Twitter is a huge conversation of hundreds of thousands of people at one time.  There are business owners, consumers, men, women, teens - any demographic you could think of. More importantly, your demographic and target market is using Twitter right now.

To monitor the conversation, use your TweetDeck desktop application to add a new column using the "+" (plus) sign at the top.  From there, enter some terms you think your target market would be talking about on Twitter.  For instance, one of my clients sells grand opening kits, which can be grand opening balloons and other types of inflatable outdoor advertising products.  To listen to his target market, he could add a column in TweetDeck and listen in for people who use the phrase, "my grand opening" our "our grand opening."  Then they might see some Tweets like the image below.

From there, GiantPromotions could start following some of these people and track their success.  Listening to your customers is the first step to marketing your business with Twitter.

3. Chime in the conversation when it's appropriate.  Don't butt in.

Continuing to use GiantPromotions as an example, they have an excellent opportunity to chime in the conversation with some of these Twitter users.  Remember - they're starting to follow some of their core target customers (businesses that are going to have a grand opening soon) and can really provide some value.

Here's what GiantPromotions should try to stay away from - see the image below.

No person on Twitter is ever going to see these links or click them because no person on Twitter has a reason to click this links.  They're not providing value, and they're not connecting with customers.  Instead of just tossing out links on Twitter, like businesses have been doing lately, let's take a more relational approach.  Instead, let's talk with our customers.  Connect with our customers.  Build relationships with our customers and show them you care - and add value.  People are relational, and they want you to care about them.

In this case, a great Tweet response for GiantPromotions would be, "@Cloudnineathens good luck with your Grand Opening! We  wrote an article that might help you http://bit.ly/fVeb81 Can we help?"

See what we're doing?

• We're participating in the conversation
• We're adding value by suggesting an article that might help, not just spamming
• We're sending them directly to the link they might be interested in

I'd also suggest following @Cloudnineathens to see how their Grand Opening goes, and maybe even making a note to reach out to them on March 5th or 6th to see how it goes.  If possible, also send them a little card in the mail and congratulate them on their grand opening, and ask them to follow you on Twitter.  Now that's interacting with your clients.

4. Don't always post a link in your Tweets.

Again, Twitter is all about a conversation.  It's a fluid, live, conversation between tons and tons of people.  Act on Twitter as you would in real life - there are times when its appropriate to play show and tell with someone you're talking to, and there are times when its not appropriate.  Sometimes, its also relevant to show a link to a website that doesn't even belong to you - just to participate in the conversation and strengthen the relationship between you and your users..

5. Re-Tweet often.

By re-Tweeting some Tweets on occasion, you show more and more relevance with your users.  Remember - your marketing isn't about you and your business, its all about your customers, and the community in general.  Building a community is all about building relationships - which eventually leads to Twitter followers, and ultimately, more business and customer awareness.

Google is Banning AdSense Publishers

Or, rather, they're going to be soon. I'm writing this on 2/16/2011 - and I am trying to predict the future. You see, there is a pretty hefty battle going on between Google and Yah-Bing (Yahoo has been sucked up by Bing and no longer is capable of having its own identity). A perfect example of capitalism, Google and Bing are battling for market share - and what does that ultimately mean? They both need to become better than the other. What does that mean? They'll both bring higher quality results to us, the end user.

With that said, Google needs to focus on bringing to the table the best possible search results on the planet. Or, well, search results that are better than Bing's.

How many times have you done a search and had to revised your search 3 or 4 times before you found what you were looking for? Did you come across spammy, made-for-AdSense websites that showed no value?

Do you know what spammy, made-for-AdSense websites are? They're what's going to get legitimate publishers canned from AdSense permanently. (And our AdSense earnings confiscated!)

So here it goes - I was on Tweetdeck the other day, and I noticed a Tweet come through that said, "Big Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers" and contained a link to the user's website. Since there's a lot of talk about how Google is going to need to clean up the web by banning AdSense publishers, I decided to click and check it out. The website I came to was a perfect example of why Google is banning AdSense publishers. Made-for-AdSense website SPAM.

Here are 5 ways to identify the type of web spam that Google is banning AdSense publishers because of.

1. The site contains no useful content.

The site that I'm referencing is here. If you read the article, it has no really great meaninful content at all. If you were an AdSense publisher that was going to get banned by Google, then chances are you've done something to maliciously thwart Google's policy in some way. Attempting to thwart Google's policy means that you know Google's policy, but blatantly are trying to skirt around it. This article title is meant to get Google AdSense publisher's attention, but once it gets their attention, no real value is added. Spammy, spammy, silly web content, shame on you.

2. The content isn't unique.

Compare the content from BestDocumentInfoBlog.info and Techzene.com. Do you see a resemblance at all? Its the exact same content. This is called duplicate content, and it is absolutely hated by Google and other search engines. At least this spammer could have done was re-written the article to make it pass Copyscape.

3. There are Google Adsense, 7Search, or some other ads on the website.

As Harry Shum said in my previous post, "There must be some economic reason" why these spammers are participating in these practices. And there is! Because its profitable. If you land on the first page of Google with one of your websites, its fairly easy to make hundreds of dollars a month with Google AdSense.

4. The spam websites have links to completely unrelated websites.

The website we're talking about, BestDocumentInfoBlog.info, has a link on its page that says, "Shabby Chic Dresser" or something or other. It links over to a website, Shabby-chic-furnishings.co.uk. Why would an article about Google AdSense publishers link back to a website in the UK which talks about Chic dresses? Because both websites belong to the same person, a spammer who has created made-for-AdSense websites.

5. The website doesn't have a particular niche in mind.

This can be tricky, because I have seen some spam websites that stick to a particular niche, but in general, they really don't stick to one niche. BestDocumentInfoBlog.info has every niche imaginable, and on each page links to completely unrelated niches. Its this type of spamming that goes on that hurts our reputation as SEOs and AdSense publishers.

In short, I'm very much looking forward to Google taking out some of these spammers and banning AdSense publishers, but I'm not excited about losing the amount of cash that's in my AdSense account due to someone else's spamming activity. Its been over 77 days since I was due a payment from AdSense, and I'm afraid that AdSense is holding my payment until there is a manual review.

Anyone else experiencing something similar?

Today is 2/14/2011, and to be quite honest, I don't know what to blog about.  This week, I have three great options:

• Bing's latest policy change regarding Intellectual Property Guidelines
• Google's upcoming policy changes (I don't want to blog about this yet, I think I might be jumping the gun and face some heat)
• JCPenny getting slapped in the face by Matt Cutts for using black hat tactics

Microsoft's Announcement of their new Intellectual Property Guidelines can be found here.  Yeah, I nofollowed that link on purpose.

With all of this talk about Google algorithm changes, content farms, spammy content, etc., the question comes to mind - what is the real problem with the internet today?  Is it really as filled with spam as users believe?  What caused the problem?  And here's the most important question of them all - what is the solution?

For those of you who missed the sparring debate between Matt Cutts and Harry Shum, I saw and transcribed the first 14 minutes of the debate for your viewing pleasure.  I haven't had time to transcribe the rest of the conversation, but there were a few accusations by Harry Shum from Bing later in the conversation that makes me think that Google Adsense publishers are going to get hammered with quality control, which in the end, will result in them not being paid and being dismissed from the Google AdSense network. Here's a link to the video in which Harry Shum presents the real problem of search spam.  For your convenience, I've transcribed his comments below to the best of my ability - starting right at 15:00.

"Well I think Google, as our industry leader, and Matt in particular, should be very much responsible for so much spam that we've seen.  I have read in Matt's two latest blogs, and I would say you have side stepped the big problem there.  I'd say that's really the origin of the search spam content - why it actually appeared in the first place.  There must be an economic incentive for those people to create this kind of shallow content - this barely mediocre content.  Why did they do that? Google Ads."

Guys, make no mistake about it - Harry Shum is making the accusation that Google AdSense publishers have created the spam problem we are facing today.  He is pointing out that most of the websites you see that bring back spammy results have Google Ads all over them, and since the spammers are making tons of money, they'll continue to thrive.

So what's the solution?

Well, here's what I think is going to happen first.  Below, you'll see a screenshot of my Google AdSense account and the balance that is in the account.  Google AdSense pays its publishers when they reach a $100 threshold, and I hit my $100 threshold around December 1st.  If you read Google's payout statement, it says, "You are scheduled to be sent a payment within 30 days of the end of this month."  The problem is that I was supposed to be paid January 1st - Google is 39 days late by their own standards.  So what is happening?  I think Google is going to manually review each website of mine that has earned money via Google AdSense, and if they don't find my websites to be high quality enough, they're going to dismiss me as an AdSense publisher and revoke any earnings I've had.

I think this is one place they're going to start tackling the web spam problem.  Each time and advertiser is due to be paid, they'll manually review the website to see if its a spammy website which only exists to earn money from Google AdSense.  Like Harry Shum so rightly stated, "There must be an economic incentive for those people to create this kind of shallow content."

He's right.  And I think publishers are in for a huge wake up call.  Remember, a Googler recently spoke about new changes coming to Google's algorithm soon!

2010 brought a ton of changes to the search engine optimization industry.  There was tons of progress made by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (and Blekko!) that brought search engine optimization to the next level.  Google Instant was launched, Bing acquired Yahoo, Blekko made some progress into the market share, and other great changes for SEO as a hole.  On top of that, Google has been doing a great job focusing on killing web spam that has been appearing from black hat and grey hat search engine optimizers, and has started a process of making them run for the hills.  All of these SEO changes have made us white hat SEOs excited about 2011.

Unfortunately, the year 2010 was also packed with rumors, lies, and spam being sent across the internet in a hundred different various forms.  This made us legit search engine optimizers scramble to discover the truth among the lies, and also at times to calm down our clients and customers who thought it was the end of the world for their websites.  The amount of times I've had to answer these rumors are incredible, and so I'm here to put a stop to the most annoying and frustrating SEO rumors in 2010.

Here are the top 5 search engine optimization rumors of 2010:

1. SEO is dead.

With each new Google algorithm change, each new announcement from any of the search engines, someone always posted a blog announcing that, "SEO is dead!"  Well, this never really amounted to anything except a few laughs from us SEOs who knew better.  Inevitably, 2011 will bring more people out of the woodworks crying wolf that SEO is dead.  I can't wait.

2. Treating your customers like crap and getting them to post bad reviews about your services will not lead to more links, and then better search results.

Treating your customers like crap will not benefit your company - ever.  Bad reviews won't ever lead to better results for two key reasons; first, they're bad reviews.  People are using peer reviews more and more online during their purchasing decisions, and having bad reviews about your business is bad.  Period.  Second, most of the major review sites use "no follows" on the links to your website, which means you're not getting any Page Rank credit, or anchor text pass through from the reviews anyway.

3. Google's web spam team is asleep at the wheel.

I've read a ton of blog posts and chatter throughout 2010 that Google's web spam team (Matt Cutts and others) were asleep at the wheel.  Just because non-intelligent SEOs were angry about something or other doesn't mean Google wasn't hard at work trying to make the world a better place.  On the contrary, they had their nose to the grindstone and were working on a ton of new changes that effect web spam.  For instance, hacked sites were a huge problem in 2010.  Hackers were taking control of other websites and adding their own links to them, or distributing malware, or worse.  Google put many many changes in place which effected this directly and worked diligently to try to find solutions to this problem.

Another major thing search engine optimizers were talking about was the changes to Google's algorithm that effected poor quality content and link farms.  Google did a great job recognizing that the internet was becoming more and more cluttered with rewritten spammy content from very few relevant sources.  Google is working hard to make 2011 a worse year for this type of spam.  (This will need to be a separate blog post!)

4. You only need good incoming links for search engine optimization.

I'd like to meet the people who came up with this search engine optimization lie.  Its really quite funny - if all you needed was a ton of incoming links, why do you even write content on your website?  Haven't you heard of crawlability, content, keyword latent indexing, site architecture, good internal linking practice, and relevant content? (Did you notice I said the word, "content 3 times? HINT HINT!)

5. The keywords meta tag plays a factor with Google and other search engines.

No, you fool, it doesn't, and it hasn't for some time.  I can't tell you how many people still feel that this is a needed tag on their website.  Look at my website - do you see a keyword tag anywhere on the website?

I think not.

2011 is likely to bring some exciting changes for us search engine optimizers who are willing to put in the work, patience, and skill required to optimize websites properly.  Its going to be more important to compete with extremely high quality content, high quality incoming links, and other areas of expertise that brings in the real, long, and lasting SEO results.

I just came across a blog post via Twitter that was a dialog between a Googler and others at WebmasterWorld.  The Googler made this claim:

"...I've personally been working on it [spam issue] for over a year. The central issue is that it's very difficult to make changes that sacrifice "on-topic-ness" for "good-ness" that don't make the results in general worse. You can expect some big changes here very shortly though."

More on this later - I'm in a conference at OMS San Diego on Social Media.  Great stuff to start sharing with my clients!

Here's a link to the original post: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4263013.htm

Today, I saw a commercial on TV and decided to go to Google to read some more about the company I viewed the commercial on.  I did a Google search for the company URL, and I was shocked at the results.  I saw a blatant example of "do not do" search engine optimization - a fresh new example of keyword stuffing.  Not only was Google not banning them permanently (which is what it should have done), it allowed the website to display on the first page for a brand that was completely separate from the website.

This brought me to a strange question.  Does keyword stuffing still work?

Has anyone else seen any keyword stuffing going on in any of their respective niches?

Earlier this week, Matt Cutts, Harry Shum, and Vivek Wadhwa sat down at a search marketing forum put on by Bing about the "Future of Search".  This turned out to be quite the debate, because right before the conference, Google announced via a blog post by Search Engine Land that Google had caught Bing "cheating" by copying the search results of Google.  This is a transcript I put together of the sparring match.

Vivek Wadhwa:
... New years eve, I had a little bit to drink, and I wrote an article on Google and how we needed a newer and better Google.  It was like I threw a match onto a gallon of kerosene.  This sort of blew out all proportion and I started getting bombarded with emails, and blog after blog started echoing what I said… the Washington post had two articles about it last week.  So it’s become a very exciting topic, and this morning we have tw o interesting announcements.  We have Blekko announcing they are going to ban the content farms, and more interestingly, We have Google announcing that they are calling Bing out for cheating…. One can accuse Microsoft for plagiarism.  We have matt cuts from Google, Harry Shum of Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko.
So let’s start with a question of what are we going to do about it. Matt, I should let you speak first. What are you going to do about the mess that’s been created?

Matt Cutts:
Well, so, for people who don’t have context, back in June of last year, we were looking at a very interesting spell correction where the spell correction team at google have done a really good job aty being able to find a misspelled query and correct them.  And we noticed that bing had had the same result at number one but without having the spell correction. And we couldn’t understand how they could have found that particular page without anchor text, without the words on the page… and over the course of the next few months, we started to see some overlap where results that were number one on Google would show up number one on Bing, and I have to admit, there was a guy in my office, Amit Shengal, he’s essentially the head of search quality…

Vivek Wadhwa:
Nice guy!

Matt Cutts:
He’s a nice guy, very smart guy.  And he was very suspicious, and I was like, I was a lkitttle skeptical , and I said, “Well, maybe they’re just getting a little better, right?” And so in December, what Google decided to do was to run an experiment and actually took 20 laptops with Windows installed and IE8 and the Bing bar, and we constructed (and this is one time experiment and this is the only time we’ve done this and we intend to turn this code off) basically synthetic queries with inserted results. So nonsense search results.  And we sent those 20 engineers to their homes with these clean installs of laptops and we said, “OK each day click on one of these results on Google...  We ran various versions of the experiments… and what is for these synthetic, for these inserted results, within two to three weeks, these results would show up within Bing. And so it was almost like a map maker who constructs a fake street and then they see if that map gets copied, or someone who does yellow pages, they insert a fake person’s name and see if that name shows up…

Vivek Wadhwa:
Alright, so he’s taken the gloves off from the get go… How do you respond to the allegations of cheating?

Matt Cutts:
So, Microsoft has said that they don’t copy the results and we have screenshots that make it look very much like it’s happening, so I’d love if you guys could talk about that.

Harry Shum:
I was uh… oh god, that was a really really great opening… And uh,

Matt Cutts:
I’d prefer if it weren’t a really great opening.

Harry Shum:
…it’s too bad that I have to be the head of engineering at the Microsoft today and talk about Bing… so it’s really interesting that Matt actually mentioned about all those things, about Microsoft search quality has really improved, almost dramatically, over the last few years.  I think let’s not discount that, our thousands of engineers working hard in Microsoft and there are a lot of signals that we really take and we are really looking day and night into all those different problems.  What I really learned this morning I would say in the reading Danny’s article and I really think about this problem is my view is that we’ve just discovered a new form of, I would say spam, or maybe click fraud, that the Google engineers helped us to find it out, and we really studying this thing, and just like we worry about the security flaws, I certainly wish that those customers would share with us the problems that they’ve found directly with us, instead of taking it to the press and it gets that wow effect and we have enough time to really study.  Maybe I stop here, I have more---

Vivek Wadhwa:
..he’s basically saying that you’re copying their results, you’re taking the best of what Google has and putting it on Bing.

Harry Shum:
I’m happy to address that; I would just say that it would be great that Matt and I could compare what signals we use, the algorithm we use… So if you look at how each search engine ranks the results, I’m sure Blekko does similar things, search is becomes a very difficult problem where you really take…signals… I think Matt is really referring to a few outlying examples that are constructed very creatively that are looking at how you can treat a particular search engine by making the link between the…obscure queries I should say… and with documents where you actually have signals.  Let me also say that, it’s not like we actually copy anything, it’s really about we learn from the customers who actually willingly opt in to share the data with us, just like Google does, just like other search engines do, is where we actually learn from the customers and what kind of queries they type… and what kind of clicks they do… and let’s not forget that the reason search works, the reason the web works, is really about collective intelligence among all the web users.

Vivek Wadhwa:
Understood.  Do you want to say something before I change the topic, Matt?

Matt Cutts:
Uh, yeah, actually, quite a bit.  So it seems like what we did was, we saw queries being – Google search results showing up in a lot of search results – popular queries… not just long tailed queries.  What we were able to prove, in my opinion, with this evidence… is that… the click data from Google’s users is being used in Bing, not just for these synthetic queries, but for many different queries.  That’s why we ran this experiment.  And the statement that came from Microsoft today is that, “We don’t copy Google’s results,” and it sounds like your answer was, “we do.”

Harry Shum:
I think, Matt, we should be very careful about what we mean; you should say that very carefully.  I think I want to emphasize, what we are saying is that we learn from our customers, we use the customer’s data, you should very clearly define that.  Do you mean that Google actually owns the data, that because the user used the Google search engine?  So what I am saying is that we have been very clear, we use the customer data to help improve the user’s search experience.  You know my understanding is that other search engines also do very similar things, depending on how we use the data---

Vivek Wadhwa:
Matt, I think that’s a good answer,  you don’t want to accept that?

Matt Cutts:
It’s kind of interesting to me that you say you use customer’s data but whenever I got auto updated on my windows XP install to use IE8, I got an option for suggested sites. And suggested sites says, “Would you like to see related sites as you surf around the web?”  That sounds like a very useful thing, I’m sure a lot of users opt in to that.  But I’m not sure---

Blekko:
You guys should be calling each other for years

Matt Cutts:
Hold on hold on…

Vivek Wadhwa:
We’ll let…

Matt Cutts:

I’m not sure that users realize that by either installing the Bing bar and taking defaults or by using the suggested sites feature of IE8, when they search on Google and click, those results appeared, those clicks appeared to be encrypted and sent to Microsoft, which then appear to be used on Bing’s rankings.

Harry:
Matt, I probably should ask you a question about that.   Do you really think those Google users, when they installed the Google user toolbar, have enough time to read through all the ULA, to understand what you’ve said, what you may not have said, really understand what you’re saying here?  I’m not sure what you’re really arguing here.  We have programs like the Bing bar and others---

Vivek Wadhwa:
Let’s change gears right now, this is something that will play out---

Matt Cutts:
But just to close that allegation, whenever you install the Google toolbar, there is a big red lettering in capital letters that says, “Please read this, its not the usual yada yada…”

Harry Shum:
I know, I know , it… everyone does this, Matt….

Matt Cutts:
Google… I want to categorically deny that Google does this!

Harry Shum:
We… Google does what?

Matt Cutts:
We don’t use clicks on Bing’s users in Google’s ranking.

Vivek Wadhwa:
But you’re the monopolist over here, my friend, you’re the big guys, you don’t have to…

Harry Shum:
You missed the point of my argument here.  My argument here is that users use the search engines… they actually are willing to share the data, with you for example, they actually give you search query log, you keep the data, you use the user’s data, and we collectively use the data to improve the search quality and search experience.  Whether we really get the help of the Google engineers at their spare time… by the way, did you really use 20 engineers to do it?

Matt Cutts:
Yeah.

Vivek Wadhwa:
Let’s change topics right now because we can… this battle will play out in the blogs for the next few weeks for sure…