Twitter is testing a new feature called “retweets” on a small percentage of accounts currently. I felt lucky to see my account has been included in to this Beta Retweets testing so I can write about it promptly.

New “retweet” button is displayed at the end of each tweet. We only see retweets of the people we follow. Retweet button enables people to forward interesting tweets to their followers. You can undo your retweets from the retweets page and get the message “your followers will no longer see the tweet as retweeted by you” message. There are retweets by you, retweets by others and your tweets, retweeted sections in retweets page. To make retweet easy to spot, they have added an icon at the beginning of retweets.

Retweet button screen shoot

Twitter is planning to see the performance of retweets and release the feature once it is ready. Social media is growing as those guys are leading people to communicate, share and spread the word around. Twitter, as a micro blogging platform became so powerful by just asking people the most simple question “What are you doing?” and today the biggest search engines like Google and Bing are racing to sync with it to use it’s power of “real-time search”. Good job Twitter!

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

All these changes are tangible success of social media. In terms of SEO, companies should socialize, use social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and keep an eye on what others tweet about themselves. I believe there is no better tool on the web that Twitter to monitor the real-time reputation of a company. Both Google and Bing index tweets and updates so it’s our job to explain our clients the importance of each comment and the consequences they might bring. Keep yourselves open to changes….

I don’t know if you already know this or not but you can set up your own social bookmarking website for free by using Pligg CMS Solutions!
About a year ago, I started a Turkish website called Linkopedi where I was intending to give links for social bookmarking websites and easing link building process for my visitors. After some time, I saw my users were eager to send their website data and asking me to publish them on this website. As a very curious person, I really love experimenting new things so I said why not and added a directory folder under my website and started building links for my visitors; it was very risky I accept but at the end of the day my visitors were happy and it was increasing my traffic as well.

Turkish Social Bookmarking Website Linkopedi

Recently, I came across to Pligg and I am so happy to announce that my Linkopedi finally became a social bookmarking website where people can submit their stories, save their favourite websites, vote on other’s stories, create groups, discuss anything they want and communicate with each other by the help of this free CMS. I am still in process of translating the CMS but the main features are working in Turkish so the website is alive!

I just started experimenting Search Engine Optimization for Pligg and write about my suggestions for other Pligg users in the future.

I would love to hear from you if you could check out Linkopedi to see how Pligg works and send me your comments!

Since Matt Cutts from Google throw a bombshell in SMX advanced meeting in 3th of June about Page Rank Sculpting, every search marketing blog is discussing the same issue. Is it really like “nofollow” attribute no longer passes more juice to followed links or not and what changes shall SEO’s do in that case? First of all lets have a look at what page rank sculpting is all about.

What is page rank sculpting?

Every page has a page rank value, that is a numerical weighting that it passes in to the links allocated in it. Page Rank sculpting occurs when we use “nofollow” attribute in unimportant links to prevent passing page rank values so that we pass that left over weight in to followed links to increase the page rank of those links.

According to Google’s change, regardless of  “nofollow” attribute, Google determines the Page Rank  it passes along  links according to the number of links on a web page. That is using “nofollow” no longer generates more page rank for the followed links. Here are some of Matt Cutts goodies:

“At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time.”

“Yes, I would agree that Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. But that’s no reason to make PageRank a complete black box; if I can help provide people with a more accurate mental model, overall I think that’s a good thing. For example, from your proposed paragraph I would strike the “The number of links doesn’t matter” sentence because most of the time the number of links do matter, and I’d prefer that people know that. I would agree with the rest of your paragraph explanation.”

“I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results.”

“Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.”

What to do next?

So what if you want to have links on your page but want Google not to count them when determining the page rank flow values? SEOmoz has a useful post on this topic so it is worth to have a look at and get some ideas such as using iframes for comments section in your blogs.

I don’t count my self as an expert in SEO yet but from the very beginning of my search marketing journey, there is one thing I learned which is creating a good search experience and unique content in your website is the king and it is better to avoid complicated practices if your website is already performing good.

Do you think so?

Google unveiled Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in Google I/O conference last week. Since I was not there I searched on the internet and found out what Google Wave is all about. First of all, it is something we all need to wait and experience to understand how much difference it can make in our business and daily communication needs. It seems to be a combination of email, instant messaging and micro-blogging all under the same interface. There are some terminologies which we all will become familiar with as we use Google Wave. Ok, lets have a look at it.

Above is a screenshot of how Google Wave looks like. On the left, there is your Google Wave folders and your Google contact list with images of your contacts. There is Google wave inbox in the middle of screen where you can click on any wave to open a pane for that wave on the right side of the screen. There users can see everything about that wave, respond to waves, add more people just by simply dragging pictures of people in their contact list in to the wave,  rewind back and see how that wave evolved over time, change the contents in a wave or see the changes made by other users in a wave.

People on a wave can send messages in the real-time where participants see other people’s keyboard clicks letter by letter. You can use the “Draft” mode if you don’t want people to see your words until you send them.You can also private message to someone within a wave. Your message will be kept in the content flow of the wave but that message will be displayed only to you and your private contact.

Another exciting feature of wave is that people can share images by just dragging the image in to the waves. They can also share Google Maps which can be editted, games, event invitations etc.

“Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.”

And we come to the point that mostly interests me. Waves can be used across websites on the net as they can be embedded on any blog or website. The Google Wave Embed API allows us to aggregate conversations on third party websites, anywhere in the web in our website. Visitors will be able to see waves and they can join in and participate to the waves from websites. Those messages will directly be published in the original wave. This can be a great online marketing and communication tool to promote products, get valuable straight feedback from the clients, enable real-time communication, and extend our networks.

Google wave is open-sourced and it will evolve by the help of developers over time and will be a product created by it’s own users.  Developers can build their own apps just like Facebook and iGoogle within waves which will bring new advertising opportunities as well.

Google wave will be available later this year. You can sign up for Google Wave updates and be informed about when it is coming a live.

Here is a long official video of Google wave.  Enjoy it.

Twitter made a deal with major mobile operators Telus, Virgin Mobile, and Koodo Mobile in Canada that enable two-way SMS support for mobile phone users in Canada to send and receive Twitter updates without any additional fees from their mobiles via SMS.

Mobile tweets are treated as standard messages and are charged with standart rates. Twitter says they want to extend real-time networking experience to mobile devices everywhere through the simple technology of SMS and are working on this service on the rest of the world right now.

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Last week Google launced a new gadget for Google Friend Connect called “Get Answers”. The gadget provides community interaction and engagement to websites such as users can ask questions to website’s community, answer questions asked by other community members and vote answers. Also they can see automatic answers by Google for their questions. The good thing is as long as you become a member to any website which is very easy, other community members can see your profile and visit your website so the gadget is helpful in terms of driving traffic to community members websites as well. I have just added Get Answers Gadget on this site and can’t wait for your participation

Furthermore, as a siteowner, you can get feedback about your content, revise your website depending on the expectations of your community by enhancing user engagement with Get Answers. Don’t worry, you have control over the content such as deleting the questions or answers if you don’t find them appropriate.

It takes just a few steps to set up Goggle Friend Connect Gadget for your website. You need to have a Google account, upload 2 files to the server of your website then get the code to paste in to your website. Easy as a pie! Let me know when you start using the widget so I will visit you and maybe ask you some tricky questions

Join in now!

If you are involved in internet marketing business, you should make sure that you use all juicy features of Search Engines to drive traffic to your websites.

Google local and Google maps is a great way of driving free traffic to your website, especially your local customers. It helps people to find your business on Google maps and appear in Google organic search results for your local area with relevant keywords. For instance; if you type “SEO Warrington” in google search, you would see Future Searches is listed in local results and it is all for free. Great isn’t it?

Or if you go to Google maps and type “SEO Great Sankey”, you will  see our listing in Google maps ” again for free”.

How to get listed in Google Local Search and Google Maps?

All you need to do is to log in to Google Local Business center and follow the instructions. You need to have a google account (if you don’t have don’t worry, you can have one in minutes) to log in to local business center. You need to provide your postal address, telephone number, URL, a brief description of services you offer. You will be asked to verify your information either by phone, email or sms. Google says it takes normally 24-38 hours to be listed in the relevant listings but I guess it can take more than that in some circumstances. You can monitor the result of your submission and the success of your listing from the same window. You can update your listing any time by following the same route.

Do you know any helpful tactics to drive traffic to your website like Google Local and Google Maps. If so, please let me know.

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It was not long ago when blogging started becoming popular amongs internet addicts. I remember creating my first blog, writing things popped in to my mind those days, I felt like i was naked. Today, everyone has a blog!

Below is a list of why blogs are useful for internet marketing:

1. Blogging is an easy way of creating a website or improving the content of a website by adding them as an internal part of a website, bringing many additional features like comments, trackbacks, RSS together.

2. It is a great tool to rank in search engines result pages, attract customers and keep them up to date about your company and products. The more content you create, the more likely search engines index your website and your website ranks in organic search results.

3. It also increases your customers loyalty and interest as long as you reply to comments and let them know that you are listening what they say. If used effectively, blogs can even be turned in to a community.

4. Most bloging systems offer search engine friendly URLs so search engines crawl and rank them easily.

5. They offer RSS feature which helps socialization of your blog in many ways. For example, your blog would be listed in RSS search engines, synicating RSS feeds will let people to read a summary of the website’s recently added content from different sources. Those embedded content would send traffic to your website.

6. Blogging is a great way of improving your link popularity. There are many widgets available to socialize your blog on the web like Twitter, Technorati etc. (I will write about this issue in details soon) Link exchange between blogs is also very common. WordPress does mutual link building automatically between WordPress blogs.

7. Your blog would be listed in blog search engines and directories which is another source of traffic for your website.

8. Blogs offer search engine friendly structures in terms of categorizing the content. The more easy your content is categorized, the more likely you are going to rank for that category.

Those are the benefits of having a blog in terms of SEO and internet marketing especially if you integrate it in to your companies website. Do you think there are other benefits that I haven’t mentioned yet?