“Facebook makes you hate people you know, Twitter makes you like people you’ve never met”

- Author Unknown

In the last week, the SEO world in the UK & around the world has been shocked by the tragic & untimely passing of Jaamit Durrani. I wanted to share a few thoughts on him.

I only met the guy once, at Think Visibility, but his impact on me was huge.

June 2009. Although I was in a stable job, I wasn’t where I wanted to be geographically. I was a little bored with living in North Wales, tensions between myself & mum & dad were straining (justifiably – I was a knob), and many of my friends moved away from the area. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from life, and had a stupid idea that this blog was going to make me a gazillionaire – discussions in my local was surrounding making millions, but not entirely sure how. Nevertheless, I ramped up blogging. Lyndon Antcliff – one person I was following on twitter – came up with a bunch of ideas for linkbait. One of which was “1 Cristiano Ronaldo, or PR6 links?”. I got scribbling, asked him for a retweet, and he duely obliged.

Amongst the retweets was Jaamit. Unlike many of the other retweeters though, I kept speaking to him. Over time, and through him, I got to meet many people associated with SEO virtually on Twitter. Amongst them was the guys & girls associated with #mancseo. I January I attended my first one, decided that in terms of my career I needed to move to Manchester, two months later getting a job & then the rest – as they say – is history.

I’m a firm believer in causality – I do think rather a lot about what if’s & whether if Jaamit retweet (and subsequent discussion) that tweet of mine I wouldn’t be end up living in Manchester. I’m unsure (I was familiar with individuals in SEO at that point). However, what I am sure about is that in the year & a bit I spoke to Jaamit (both online & in person), I found him a lot of fun.

Two stories online stand out for me. One night I was having trouble sleeping, so like a good little social media bunny I tweeted such a fact. Jaamit (who was awake at the time), tweeted back “I’d recommend you count sheep, but being a Welshman you’d probably get the wrong idea. ”. Next morning I woke up,  checked Twitter again & found 3 Direct Messages from Jaamit saying he was sorry if I offended him. I told him he didn’t, I just fell asleep.

Since then, it was fair game to rip the piss out of each other.

The second story was on the morning of Think Visibility, during Mel’s talk. For those of you who weren’t there or who didn’t read the twitter feed, the room that was unmentionably hot. Like a good little social media bunny I tweeted this, saying the room was “hot & sweaty”. The first tweet back was from Jaamit saying “I know! I can smell you from here!”.

When I finally met him (later that day, to which I greeted him with “Can you smell me now Jaamit?”), I was greeted with a guy who was fun, smiling & joking – the Jaamit I grew to know on Twitter. Like so many people have said – the Jaamit that we knew online was pretty much the same we knew offline. I enjoyed his Link Building Presentation at Think Visibility, and we (and a few others) shared dinner after the event, which was good fun. He thought me & Carly were going out. A fact that I mercessily ripped the piss out of him for. Ironically getting to know him in that time I learnt more about his approach to SEO than I did from speaking to him on Twitter for a year and a bit – as so often the case in this industry.

So it was with a heavy heart that I heard the news on Friday, I was in total disbelief. I can’t pretend I knew him well, but feel terrible for those who knew him a lot better (people such as Rishi, Richard, Annabel, Amrit & Claire amongst others), and couldn’t begin to comprehend what is wife is going through.

Wonderfully, the much criticised SEO community (a criticism I disagree with) has rallied around & a lot has been put in force – you can read about what’s been done for Jaamit in this blog post.

All I can say in closing is RIP Jaamit, wish I had chance to get to know you better.

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

For those of you who were on Twitter yesterday, you may have seen your friends tweet about Twifficiency, a service that offered to calculate your Twitter Efficiency based upon Twitter Activity, written by James Cunningham.

I saw several people tweet about this, so I myself gave it a go. Which realised why people were tweeting about it.

Basically, after authorising access to your profile (via OAuth), it gives what I think is an arbitary number, which is then automatically tweeted to your twitter feed.

Immediately people began crying spam, scam & leaving your profile open to attack, but I am not so sure.

Yeah, it’s a bit deceitful in that twitter automatically tweets things to your profile, but I don’t think that any malice behind it. After all, James put his Twitter handle on the site to hopefully create connections (it was something similar I did with UKSEOHere). If he was to use it to spam, would he have attributed his work to his site?

When I got into programming, there wasn’t the social API’s that is available now, so the worst I got was a corrupted database or server load being high. Now with the wealth of technology available, it’s remarkably easy to create something that interacts with popular websites (as demonstrated by UKSEOHere). To create an OAuth login for Twitter, followed by a tweet, it is impressive (I’ve been pissing around with the OAuth for Foursquare, and it’s not as easy as it seems).

Often the only way to test things is to test them in a real life environment, which is something I did with UKSEOHere, which got a bit out of control with Twifficiency, leading to what was seen yesterday.

I’d hate to see James – who is a 17 year old kid – be labeled as a scammer. From reading his twitter feed he realises he screwed up, and a temporary fix has been added (basically a disclaimer in bright red on the site), with hopefully a fix coming later. Being a smart lad, I imagine it won’t take long.

Nevertheless, if you want to get rid of it (which I do recommend anyway, just to keep your profile clean), you can revoke access using the Twitter Connections page.

What is Google Alerts?

Basically, Google Alerts is a service that sends you email whenever a relevant update is made to the Google Search Listings. It’s more about new pages being indexed, and covers News, Blogs, Discussions, as well as the original search.

Notation

I will use some odd notation to format some of these alerts, this is to replace with your own stuff.

• Square Brackets [] - Replace what ever is in the square brackets with what’s described in the square brackets (for example, with this site, replace [your url] with http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/
• Standard Brackets () - This is optional & can be removed. I’ll explain why in the description.

[blog name]

This should only be used in blogs/web 2.0 search & news search. This simply tells us when you are mentioned. I’ve seen this utilised by many big web brands, with high up brand members commenting on the site to

If you release anything associated with your blog that you’ll later sell, it’d be stupid not to have this.

@[twitter name] -site:http://twitter.com (-site:[your url])

Unfortunately, you cannot find links to your twitter page (or I don’t really know how if it’s possible!), but often when people who link to your twitter page will use the keyword (in my example) “@rhyswynne”. You can track linked pages in Google Alerts, but Google is remarkably slow in showing new links to sites, so instead we’ll just search for your twitter handle being mentioned on sites.

We add the negative site operator, as we don’t want any mentions of your twitter handle on Twitter, and I also like removing my site URL as I have a lifestream on this page. You may want to add this or not.

“[a query that you can answer]“

A good one that I’ve used in the past is to monitor discussions & everything for queries you can answer quickly & easily. Say for example you sell tea cosies on your blog, you can search for “Where can I buy tea cosies online?”. Be creative. There’s no limit to the amount of searches you can do for this.

What you are searching for here is forum posts & discussions. Places you can join & answer questions. Try not to spam the forums but be useful, even answering a couple of threads before & after the target thread & contributing to discussion.

Over To You!

These are just three Google Alerts I have on my account. Do you have any that differ from the above? Do share them in the comments!

I got myself locked in the shower of my house & after screaming out of my window to get a passer by to ring for the fire brigade, I was rescued. It was an amusing story which resulted in a lot of discussion (often laughing, often directed at me).

Furthermore, in doing so, I gained about 60 new followers in about 2 hours.

I wouldn’t call myself a social media guru, but if I was, I’d call what I created a buzz. A humourous buzz with me in my smiley face boxer shorts, but dammit, it was a buzz. A buzz that many people would probably pay good money for.

After a tweet from Han saying I should write a blog post about it, I thought about why I got the response I did. In the end, I could only give one example.

People actually like me on social media.

I wouldn’t call me incredibly popular, but rarely do I talk about my job or my skills (SEO, PHP & Internet Marketing) on twitter. Instead a number of my posts are observations, thoughts or just random. Which seems to cause people to give a damn about me.

People Giving a Damn – Real Life Example

I’ll give you an example from wrestling. For years Stone Cold Steve Austin was “Stunning” Steve Austin, and “The Ringmaster” Steve Austin, a talented wrestler who was always there or there abouts. His problem was a lack of character – people didn’t really connect with him. In the mid 1990′s he became “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, a beer swilling, swearing, arse kicker. Crowd responses went through the roof, with massive “pops” – (huge Beatles esque cheers from the crowd). Austin was destined to rise to the upper echelons of super stardom, with a combination of a red hot character, and being an amazing wrestler.

Half way through the megarise, at Summerslam 97, he suffered a serious neck injury which threatened his career.

In reality his career should’ve been over, but within a few short months he was back. He lost a lot of his wrestling ability, with his matches being a lot more punches & kicks than technical masterpieces, but the crowd didn’t care, as they cared more about him.

And therein lies the issue, getting people to care about you & you can get away with being lazy. The Undertaker gets a bigger reaction from diving over the top rope twice a year than Yoshi Tatsu gets from doing it every night. Seth Godin gets more reaction from his 200 word blog post every week than a blog post with 2000 words of dry crap 12 times a day. Both Seth & The Undertaker connecting with people, and the easiest way to do it is just being yourself.

So on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channels, don’t just spam your followers, get to know them, show a human side. Not a “look at me! I’m working from home with a new car! Find out how by clicking here! ($9.95 a month)”. But talk about events (it really annoys me when the world is suffering a crisis, or there’s a world cup, and people who I *know* are interested in it are instead tweeting about the latest post or affiliate post), just come across as human, as it’s amazing how many “Social media gurus” don’t. I’m not saying you should deliberately lock yourself in a shower & call the fire brigade, but talking about everyday stuff, like the rest of us, and you’re more likely to connect.

Do this, and you’ll get a lot more buzz for when you actually want it, and not when you’re standing in front of 3 firemen wearing nothing but smiley face boxer shorts.

I’ll leave you with one more tweet from yesterday’s event:-

Further Reading

To find out more about buzz, connecting & being human on social media, I recommend reading these two great posts.

• How To Get People to Like You On Twitter? – Peter Handley, who doesn’t consider himself to be a social media expert, shares his experience in becoming a nice guy on Twitter.
• How To Write Awesome Copy With Experience – Carly shares her tips on writing like you’re an authority on a subject, using forums.

I love it, I think it’s great, and although I’m probably preaching to the converted, here’s 7 reasons why I think your blog should be on WordPress.

It’s Free

For what it does, and for amount it costs, it is amazing that it costs nothing. Sure there’s hosting costs & domain names, but there’s nothing stopping you playing with the software for nothing.

It’s Open Source

Fancy yourself as a bit of a coder? Well WordPress is entirely free to see the code. In fact, I recommend playing with WordPress to learn the basics of PHP. There is great documentation (again, open source wiki) to help you with the WordPress framework, itself a great introduction into advanced PHP programming & working with API’s & frameworks.

Furthermore, with it being open source, if a bug is discovered, it’s fixed relatively quickly.

It Is Quick & Easy To Use

WordPress is famous for it’s five minute installation, and when you get good, it should take you half of that time. Logging in you can write a post within a minute, and it’s ridiculously easy to use. Changing design & adding plugins is easy as well.

As CMS’s Goes, It’s Pretty Good for SEO

Out of the box, f0r search engine optimisation, it’s okay. However, with a few tweaks, WordPress becomes a solid SEO platform. It’s certainly one of the better CMS’ out there.

It’s Well Supported

I’m not sure if there’s been a “state of the wordpress community” post ever done, but WordPress itself hosts nearly 10,000 plugins, and there must be tens of thousands of themes available online (WordPress itself only holds about 1 and a half thousand). Each one has a programmer or designer behind it, and although support varies (the official wordpress forum is average at best), enough people know what they are doing, both paid or free, to help you out.

It Can Make You A Rich Man (or Woman)

Whilst I’m not a rich man, running this blog & a few websites on WordPress have allowed me to make some money, and anybody can do this. As well as ebooks, adsense, affiliate marketing & god knows what else, you can make a fortune carrying out WordPress related services for other people.

It’s Never Going To Disappear Overnight

WordPress has some huge sites supporting it, a company fully dedicated to it’s production, and a thriving community. It’s not here today, and gone tomorrow.

So happy birthday WordPress, here’s to the next 7 years!

photo credit: arrayexception

photo credit: Jonty Wareing

I read this interesting blog post entitled “How Do Search Engines Rank Websites?“, a blog post by Mark Johnson on Site Sketch 101, whilst there have been a range of good advice (content & links being the main crux, and that nobody knows the true ranking factors bar Google, and it was the factors he considered, rather than hard fact), some of the advice I respectfully disagreed with. One such point is this:-

Bounce rate: Another factor that not many people think of. What if you do a search, click on a result and find its not what you expected? You then go back to your search results and click another link don’t you? The search engines will notice that too, that’s a pretty strong indication that the first site was not that helpful after all… So yeh, your bounce rate matters a lot more than you might have thought.

I’m of the opinion that bounce rate should never be a ranking factor for a number of reasons, here’s three of the reasons why.

It’s Counter Intuative for Users

If you are a user of Google, you will probably want to find the information as quickly as possible, rather than waste time reading through a bunch of blog posts. Some searches – such as “What is my IP?”, result in a one page, you have the information you need, you’ll leave.

It’s Counter Intuative for Bloggers

A couple of pages on my blog post have a very high bounce rate. Am I bothered? No. These pages have affiliate links and are targetted for search engines. The search results gets people here, and the page copy is designed to get them to click on an affiliate link & hopefully buy. It’s a bounce, because a user only visits one page on my site. Am I bothered? No, as I could earn money from it. Is the user bothered? No, as they find a solution to their problem. Bounce rate, in this case, is good. As is users’ tweeting/facebooking/stumbling my post. They leave my site, but can get a lot more visitors to my site.

It’s Against Google’s Business Model

This is where it all ties together Google’s business model. Google’s main concern is to build the best search engine they can, so that the most relevant pages are top of search engines. Both the examples mentioned above are examples of users finding what they want on the first page they hit, and then bouncing out. Should these sites lose rankings because they have high bounce rate? Of course not. It’d make Google a worse search engine because of it.

…I lost! Though thanks to Britannia Wrestling for putting on an awesome show!

In other news, move to Manchester is complete, it’s fun here, so I’ll be blogging intermittently over the next few days/weeks until I get settled.

PS. That’s a genuine look of pain on my face by the way, I arrived home to find a 3-inch splinter in my side for some reason, oh well.

The reason for my erratic postings & being all over the place is that – after 4 years of working in North Wales, I’m moving on and moving to Manchester, starting a new job on Tuesday.

Yes, in what was being a big year for change of me, with a few ideas swimming around my head (travelling, settling down in North Wales), I decided, after attending my first #mancseo meeting, that I kinda needed to be in somewhere with a bit more life, to prove myself a little more, and to actually get out from the rents house and live, as opposed to merely exist.

It’s a huge step for me, and I’d like to thank Livetech for the last four years. I arrived after a horrible episode where I was convinced I was going to die. Seriously. I had recovered from a bout of premature aortal fibulation – an irregular heart beat. It was due to stress, drinking too much and not getting much sleep, as well as being surprising common for younguns, but you have no idea how much that it scared the shit out of me.

In the end I got over it after a two week break, landed a trainee position in a local North Wales Web Design firm & it grew to a full time position in SEO. Pretty much the only North Wales company that actually does it. In any respect, I have seen so many aspects of the business and worked with so many talented people, it was a difficult decision to leave, but I feel that now is the right time. They’ll go on to strength to strength, and I want to thank them for everything they did.

Living in North Wales, can be tough if you’re young. You see, a large proportion of the population is a little old, and a proportion of the young population aren’t people I particualrly people I want to hang around with. So I rediscovered my love for Colwyn Bay Football Club, and now a regular there with good people and great friends. I even did my bit for a year, writing a share of the programme, but even then that was too much work for me. How people manage to hold full time jobs & still do hours a day for Colwyn Bay is incredible. The work is paying off as we have a playoff final on Saturday in Lancaster against Lancaster City. So thanks to Colwyn Bay for being one half of my social life.

The other half is Britannia Wrestling, something I fell into purely by chance. I met Simon through Retro Gamer forums, when I was pushing my Retro Garden website, we got talking & asked me to attend a show, I did, where I said I was a web developer, and generally helped push the website. They also started training me, as they were short a referee. As time went on I became more integrated with the shows, and became a dispicable manager (of champions, nonetheless). I retired Simon. And for the past few weeks, as well as moving to Manchester I have been training for a match.

The match is at BWP Extravaganza, in Llandudno (effectively my home town), in a “loser leaves town” tag match. I am nervous, yet really excited. Wish me luck!

I had first came into contact with Jem – the blogger behind Jemjabella – in the dim & distant days of Han, I remember reading this blog that – quite frankly – were head and shoulders above every other blog on her RSS feed (and yes, I’m even talking about my own). Her writing style had that brilliant style, the same way that Lionel Messi has a twinge of arrogance when he scores. Yes, she did regularly bitchslap people, however she was write, and they often deserved it.

You see, even as a woman (I say in jest), she is remarkably brilliant at anything that’s connected to the internet (besides her Modern Warfare 2 skills, which remain untested), even still today I use her Top Five SEO Tips & PHP Security Tips as a basis to begin either my PHP or Optimization work – and even today she has a catagory page on her blog that has had 18,000 hits on Stumbleupon. A catagory page. Furthermore, you know that list that Lisa Barone said that were 5 things that were killing your blog? Jem were doing them before they were cool.

Unlike other bloggers who are considered gurus, she is not such a thing. She doesn’t make much money blogging – because she chooses not to. When John Chow was selling Page Rank 6 links for $200 a month, she gave them away for free, not whoring herself out. In fact, she doesn’t whore herself out at all, people follow her because she’s awesome – and even today even she walked passed me in the street & slapped me, I still wouldn’t have a clue what she is, she remains hidden, hiding behind a familiar avatar you see on this post. Her readers are awesome as well & network themselves, in fact I met Mel & Carly through her blog.

So yes you probably don’t have her on her RSS feed, but yes you should also add her right now. At the moment she doesn’t blog about much bar baby vomit & gardening, any post that is even remotely geeky will be 10 times better than the best thing you’ll read that day.

Happy blog day Jem, here’s to you!

“Twitter is expected an answer to both questions [on how to make money] on Tuesday in the form of “promoted tweets,” which will put ads on Twitter, first in search results and later in user feeds both on Twitter.com and the myriad third-party clients that access the service, such as TweetDeck, twhirl, TwitterBerry and Tweetie, the last of which was just acquired by Twitter last week.”

A few thoughts on it, first it seems to say that there are a bunch of searches on Twitter.com, enough to justify putting ads on them.

The thing I’m a bit concerned with is “feeds”. I use search feeds for UKSEOHere. Will adverts be added to my search result feeds? If so, it could be a little annoying, particularly if I can’t have a say. Will there be a revenue sharing scheme? If so, how would that work? Likewise, if there’s some sort of twitter porn application, would big brands like to be associated with this?

However one thing I do like is the list of brands that are signing up. Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic & Bravo have already signed up, it’s quite a good thing for Twitter, as with new digital advertising platforms (including Google Adsense & Facebook), it started with low end & low cost advertisers before expanding into the higher end advertisers. It sets an achor value (read this great article on Anchors at Erica.biz), almost saying it’s more valuable advertising on it than Facebook & Google.

Still, it’s nice and reassuring for all the Twitter marketers & doomsaysers out there who thought Twitter was unsustainable (newsflash, I think it was, there’s too many people using it).