How Nofollow Works On Major Search Engines
Welcome back!
- Google: Follows NoFollow links but simply does not pass on credit to an outbound link that is tagged with the attribute.
- Yahoo: Follows NoFollow links and excludes the link from all ranking calculations.
- Bing: May or may not follow a NoFollow link, but it does exclude it from ranking calculations.
- Ask.com: Does not adhere to NoFollow.
Good luck,
12 tools to measure social media marketing
Businesses have been unsure of ways to measure social media campaigns, social media ROI and syncing the stats, if any, to sales data and vice versa. Here are 12 tools that I came across that can be used to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
One important fact one needs to remember here is, Social media optimization is not a number race. Businesses need to focus on growing brand awareness, customer acquisition, engagement, interaction, conviction, retention, sales, profits, and customer satisfaction rates.
So without further delay, here is the list of tools I promised.
Google Analytics: Free tool to track and report on a company’s Web site usage and online marketing activities.
TwitterAnalyzer: Free online tool analyzes a company’s influence on Twitter, including number of daily Tweets, users who are re-Tweeting your messages and their unique reach.
HootSuite: Popular free service manages and analyzes multiple Twitter users and accounts. New iPhone app links HootSuite account to mobile phone.
Radian6: Sophisticated tool that tracks conversations about competitors and share of mentions, among other metrics. Pricing starts at $500 a month per profile and $100 a month per user.
ViralHeat: Delivers real-time data from video sites, microblogging platforms and Web sites. Prices range from $9.99 a month to $139.98 a month.
Bit.ly: Free URL shortener that tracks information such as number of clicks, traffic sources and what time clicks occur.
Scoopler: Free real-time search engine that organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens through blogs and major social networks.
TweetMeme Analytics: Similar to Google Analytics, the app is useful if you use TweetMeme’s re-Tweet buttons on your site. Prices begin at $50 per domain per month.
PostRank Analytics: Suite of tools to measure social engagement on other platforms and services. Shows messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your statistics. Prices begin at $9 a month.
Twopular: Tracks the most popular trends on Twitter at no charge.
Xinureturns: Provides a free overview of your Web site presence on popular search engines and social networks.
Omniture: Captures, stores and analyzes digital transactions from Web sites and other online channels as well as offline channels such as point-of-sale promotions and call centers. Prices vary per user.
Google Analytics Annotations
Google Analytics introduced a small but very dynamic feature called “Annotations” that is tremendously useful both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.
This newly launched “annotations” feature enables you to annotate and bookmark major campaigns, ebbs & flows in the graphs regarding events that happened on specific days within your statistics for future reference. This will help to explain a spike or drop in traffic to other members within your organization, without having to dig through the past, thereby saving tons of time.
This is a great feature which will end up saving many people a lot of time. The concept here is that there can be real collaboration between those who put together campaigns and those who see the analytics without that important data. Rather than going through old emails to analyze the traffic surge, or shopping cart conversion increased, users can bookmark this event when it happens for future reference. This will sure make end of month reporting a lot quicker!
An easy annotation that outlines a “cause and effect” for the data consumer can save a lot of time and trouble. Annotations complement existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations.
Another advantage is that different members within your company can instantly see the results of other teams’ actions. In other words, annotations can be created by anyone involved with the production and promotion of a website for everyone else to see.
- The PPC team can announce major changes to their campaigns.
- The SEO team can annotate changes to the website so that results can be tracked over time.
- The PR team can update dates of events, enabling the tracking of offline activities into Google Analytics more easily.
- The media buying team can provide updates of major banner campaigns.
This should help encourage teamwork, as everyone involved will be able to grasp the whole picture and coordinate activities with other teams’ activities. Google has started rolling out this feature and has indicated it should be live for all users mid January!
Best tools to get alerted to website updates
Staying up to date on content is crucial now a days, as thousands of terra bytes of information just rolls in every micro second. I realize that it is highly unlikely & highly impossible to track and assimilate every piece of such information, but there is a need to stay informed about whats happening in our professional industry or field of personal interests. It can be about google or golf, you want to know what’s happening. So here are the some of the tools I rely on to stay informed when the content on my favorite sites is updated.
1. www.notify.me
It is quicker than others + gives you choice to receive alerts through a desktop app/ email /instant messenger or even SMS on mobile.
Here’s a short youtube video that introduces the tool’s features. Notify.me
2. http://yotify.com Not as quick as notify but it is good.
3. http://google.com/alerts (in order to receive notifications from Google about new published content, it must first be indexed by the search engine which many not occur for several hours at least)
4. http://alerts.yahoo.com it usually takes nearly an hour or more
5. http://tweetbeep.com Establish alerts for words that appear on Twitter. You can set the alerts to occur hourly or daily and they can be based on any keywords or phrases and may be limited to certain people, places, attitudes, or whether or not the tweet includes links. (you might have to weed through tons of junk tweets)
Apart from these, I also use Google reader to keep an eye on industry happenings.
http://google.com/reader It constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. It also has a built-in public page to easily share interesting items with others.
What tools do you use? and how do you like those?
- Shrinagesh
Google Fusion Labs – Google Data Management and Collaboration Tool
Google introduced Google Fusion Labs in Jun’2009. This web app helps in data management and collaboration and makes working, sharing and collaborating on data sets easier by providing a set of tools to keep the data in sync and available to all the users involved.
“Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp’d – resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly,” - GOOGLE
The new system aims to offer a simpler alternative by “fusing” usual data management with collaboration tools. For now, users can add multiple data sets, discuss on them, as well as make queries and view the data with different visualizations.
You can upload tabular data sets as big as 100 MB and up to 250 MB of data per user. Those data sets or a portion of them can be shared with other users and different individuals can have different access to them. The service keeps track of edits, so the data will always be in sync and it can also be exported as a CVS file.
Fusion Tables offers a variety of visualizations based on the Google Visualization API, for example you can view your data on Google Maps if it applies. The app is already available on Google Labs and the team plans to add more features in the future based on user feedback.
Google Wave Video Tutorial
Google Wave is launched yesterday, 30th Sep’2009.
Google Wave in Google’s words:
“Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
This video will walk you through google wave and explains how to use 15 of its features.
Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, allowing the public to develop its features through extensions. This will help the project development by leaps and bounds with third party developer support.
Mashable released a complete google wave guide including google wave glossary. Read it here.
There is a lot of buzz about Google wave and it does seem to be a very promising new gen communication platform.
Posted by shrinagesh
Responsible Microblogging
Please be a responsible microblogger
- Don’t spam.
- Don’t try to decoy people.
- Don’t spread viruses.
- Don’t spread hatred.
- Don’t load junk onto servers.
- Don’t try to sell like a hawker.
- Create a voluntary following before you start to offer something for sale.
- Put yourself in the shoes of your followers and tweet. Ask yourself if you would like to receive the post you are sending.
- Is this a post all your followers MUST see?
- Oh yes, we can always have fun. Share a joke or a quote instead of ‘I’m sleeping’, ‘I’m bored’ …
- Remember that you are being watched by search engines and your followers. Publishing great pieces like “I’m drunk” etc will only harm your reputation.
- Remember that your Twitter updates go to your followers, will be saved in your archive, and (unless you have a private profile) post to the Twitter public timeline.
Personally, I am guilty of automating my twitter a/c with an app which turned to be a spam site that sent endless stream of tweets. This not only ended in annoying my followers and friends but also hurt my tweet timeline.
Bottom line: Think twice before allowing third-party apps to use your twitter credentials.
What are your thoughts? How else can we improve twitter / microblogging?
Google Tool To Evaluate The Performance Of Webpages
What is Page Speed?
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
How does Page Speed work?
Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.
Why should you use Page Speed?
By using Page Speed, you can:
- Make your site faster.
- Keep Internet users engaged with your site.
- Reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
- Improve the web!
Supported platforms
- Mac OSX (x86 and PPC)
- Linux (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows (XP and up)
Prerequisites
Page Speed requires both of the following to be installed:
- Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 or higher (official, non-beta versions) — download from Mozilla
- Firebug Firefox Add-on 1.3.3 or higher (official, non-beta versions) — download from Mozilla
Download Page Speed
Google Analytics For Twitter
Combine Your Google Analytics Data with Twitalyzer
Many tweeters have reported that Twitter is one of their primary traffic referrers to their sites/blogs. but have no idea who your referrers are? Do you wonder how influential these referrers are? You can now load your own Google Analytics data into Twitalyzer in less than two minutes.
How to see your own Twitter referrals from Google Analytics:
1. In Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources” then “Referring Sites
2. In Google Analytics, find the referrer “/twitter.com” and click on that link
3. In Google Analytics, change the “Show rows” value at the bottom of the page to “500″
4. In Google Analytics, click “Export” at the top of the page and select “CSV”
5. Go to Twitalyzer home page and click “Browse …” and find the resulting .CSV file on your hard-drive
6. Now click “Combine Data!” to send the file to the Twitalyzer!
Happy Tweeting,
ShriNagesh 
New Marketing Microblogging Platform For Web Professionals
SPNbabble is a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter and specifically created for web professionals – authors, webmasters, web developers, web designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, bloggers and business professionals of all stripes.
Why Should You Use SPNb@bble?
If you are already using sites like Twitter and Facebook for marketing, networking, branding, PR and building backlinks, then SPNbabble can save you a great deal of time and effort. Message posts on SPNbabble will simultaneously appear on Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Tumblr and Facebook, if you have accounts on those services.
SPNb@bble Features:
* Receive message posts via IM, SMS, email or web
* Account customization
* Direct Messaging
* Simultaneous posting to Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Tumblr and Facebook
* Message Groups
* Automatic Friend Invites