Twitter has emerged as the platform of choice for infomation about the recent political unrest that has gripped Iran. With International media banned from the streets of Tehran in wake of the recent elections, some Irananians have turned to the real time social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flick and Youtube to ensure facts get out.
Twitter is getting out important messages that main stream media can’t – security forces firing on crowds, and blood soaked protesters in pain from bullet wounds. To check the latest tweets on Iran Elections use # hashtag iranelections on Twitter.
The importance of Twitter’s role in the current crisis is such that the website decided to postpone a planned maintenance of the site, which would have taken it offline for 90 minutes when hundreds of new tweets are being added every minute. Twitter users wordwide turned their avtaar ( profile picture ) to add a shade of green in support of the Iranian people and their fight for a fair election.
According to a CNN blog post, the U.S. government is connecting with Twitter and other major social media companies to make sure that the flow of information from Iran remains uninterrupted. While the Obama administration itself keeping out of the Iran controversy on official channels, it is making sure that information coming from people on the ground is getting through to the rest of the world.
The site also revealed that the US State Department asked Twitter not to go down at its original time last night in order to allow Iranians to tweet out what’s happening in their cities. It also seems that U.S. officials are watching the chatter on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere to keep updated with the situation in Iran. Social media communication is even more important, since the U.S. has no embassy or official relationship with Iran.
Is live blogging and citizen journalism changing the dynamics of traditional media and journalism ? With Twitter racing ahead of Digg and NYtimes.com , the power to communicate and broadcast is in the hands of the common man.
According to Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s Webspam Team, if you want your blog to rank well on Google’s search engine you must use Wordpress. Matt recently mentioned at WordCamp SF that Wordpress takes care of about 80 – 90 percent of SEO mechanics.
He gave a SEO presentation that spans 50 pages and also gives tips on how to rank high on Google.
The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.
Being Relevant
Google is all about relevancy, high the relevancy better the impact of your blog on search engines. According to Matt If you have a blog you need to answer basis about
Who am I ?
Why am I here ?
What do I love ?
What am I really good at doing ?
What do I have to say?
Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive. Matt recommends ALT attributes.
Wordpress URL structure is considered as a high ranking factor in Google rank algo. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).
Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.
Being Reputable
Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:
- Be interesting
- Update often
- Find your niche
- Provide a useful service
- Do original research or reporting
- Give great information
- Live blog
- Make lists
- Create controversy
- Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed
Other Useful Information
Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.
Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”
Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).
Since the launch of Google Webmaster Tools its team has been working on updates and how to tutorials on using sitemaps. Based on the research highlighted in this sitemap crawl study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.
Google and the other search engines that make up sitemaps.org, now support as many as 50,000 “child sitemaps” of sitemaps index files. In the past, they only supported 1,000. With this increased limit, webmasters can submit up to 2.5 billion URLs with one sitemap index.
Google’s Webmaster Tools , design update shows users all sitemap files that were submitted for a verified site. By the way, here’s a brief look at the update:
According to officials at Google’s Webmaster Blog, “This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file,” notes John Müller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. In addition, the indexed URL count for sitemap files in Webmaster Tools is “more precise” according to Müller.
XSD schemas have been updated to allow sitemap extensions. This allows for the creation of better sitemaps through the verification of more features. Müller says that sitemap file processing is also much faster than before, meaning the time it takes to submit a sitemap file, process it and see initial data, is much shorter.
According to company officials at Dell, its presence on Twitter has earned it more than $2 million in revenue. The Dell company blog explains, “Since we started back in 2007, we’ve not only earned more than $2 million in revenue from the @delloutlet on Twitter, but we are also seeing that it’s driving interest on new products as well.”
Officials at the company say, “There is a huge flow of people comming from @delloutlet on Twitter to the main website Dell.com/outlet site, and then ultimately deciding to purchase a new system from elsewhere on Dell.com, if we factor those new system purchases that come from @Delloutlet, we’ve actually eclipsed $3 million in overall sales.”
Dell outlet now has over 600,000 followers, that respond positively to the Twitter exclusive offers and deals. The below chart shows the growth over the last 3 months when they began to introduce more exclusive offers at that time Dell had only 11,000 followers on Twitter.
Dell also has other deals on Twitter via other Dell Twitter properties like @DellHomeOffers and @DellSmBizOffers but @DellOutlet continues to be the most popular Twitter property with a mix of Twitter exclusive offers. The @DellOutlet is now getting close to the Top 50 most followed Twitter users according to TwitterCounter.
When you run a web business, you need to keep on top of the latest initiatives that impact your business, read a lot of books and blogs in your niche and keep updated with the latest trends and happenings in the internet and web media. I read and subscribe to more than hundred blogs that relate to internet marketing, search marketing, blogging, web analytics, entrepreneurship & social media and I know that most of my readers subscribe to more than that number.
I recently stumbled upon an excellent blog Incomediary.com run by Michael Dunlop, a 20 year old blogger.
Incomediary.com is a blog about successful entrepreneurs and making income from the internet. Michael has interviewed heavy weight internet marketers and successful entrepreneurs on his blog. Some of the prominent internet marketers include Joel Comm, Yanik Silver, Craignew Mark ( founder of Craigslist ), Ewen Chia , Matt Mullenweg ( founding developer of Wordpress ) and many more names in the online world. The blog also has interview from young entrepreneurs who run successful businesses.
I love the way Michael conducts each interview and the questions that he asks each entrepreneur, these are not run of the mills questions but question that go in depth into the life of the entrepreneur, the struggles, victories and achievements.
This interview just blew my mind off, its something I haven’t come across earlier and I can only recommend you to check it out. It’s one of the most motivating and inspiring interview I’ve read, it’s about how to live a happier, more productive and more rewarding life told by a remarkable human being.
