Category Archives: Blogging

Using Twitter to Share Content

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New Twitter Benefits Usability and Sharing

During the past few months there have been a number of changes within the social media world, with two major social media platforms rolling out new look websites – creating a contrast in opinions.

On one side you have Digg, a massive social bookmark and sharing website which initially saw its traffic drop due to its new web design and features with a backlash from its user base. On the other hand you have the new Twitter, which announced a complete overhaul of the backend and website interface which so far has been met with positive remarks in general.

New Twitter Benefits

The new design brings an improved usable interface and rich media features such as:

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  • Never-ending scrolling tweet time-line
  • Embedded rich media interface in tweets (Youtube, Flickr, TwitPic)
  • Its faster and a much cleaner interface to use
  • Homepage keeps the feed going whilst a user’s profile can be viewed including replies

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Content Sharing through Social Media

There are quite a lot of people who think of twitter just like a Facebook style status update. However, Twitter has risen to be in my mind one of the better ways to share content – not just your own either.

There were a few interesting statistics given about Twitter as they launched their new interface:

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  • There are on average 370,000 new sign ups a day overall
  • We’re now seeing 90 million tweets a day – or above on average
  • About 25% of tweets contain links

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That’s a lot of tweets with something that is constantly growing for both people and businesses. The line that stood out for me was a tweet by Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder, saying the following:

Twitter levels the playing field between creators and consumers of content.

Twitter levels the playing field between creators and consumers of content.

It is interesting how different industries are using social media, in SEO everybody seems to be tweeting the latest blog post they have been reading. Many bloggers use this to their advantage as they build up online connections and receive traffic. Whenever there are industry events, there are a flood of tweets about it, together with the event hashtag – yes micro-blogging via Twitter is so popular there are even official event #hashtags used. Ironically, Facebook recently went down for everyone and released status updates on their twitter account.

Why Create a Twitter Account & Share Content?

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  • Help network with others in the industry or potential new leads
  • Connect with any followers and provide direct feedback to any questions – quickly
  • Provide and receive leading industry news and resources – others will share your content
  • Build the brand name in the social media world and a community around it
  • Content is king which may also attract links – helping your SEO efforts

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[notice] The biggest thing I have found with Twitter and sharing content is the ability to keep learning the latest trends and information from everybody else in your industry, and as you learn you can also give, helping to become an authority.[/notice]

Hopefully I will be doing the same on Twitter so please follow my personal account @NadeemAnjum or this blog’s twitter feed @SearchNest

Blogging & Long Tail Search Traffic

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Another day, another blog, a few more visits

Create a new blogI’m starting a new blog here at Search Nest. As I’m a Digital Marketing Consultant which specialises in SEO, I’m planning to focus this blog around just that, whilst having a specific link building blog at SEO Link Love. Links is such a big thing yet so niche I just think it deserves its own blog there, I want to keep the quality up rather than make a big mix and blend everything into one blog - despite the extra hard work involved.

Long-Tail Search Traffic

I wanted to get straight into the information and I thought a good way of tying it into this post was to talk about long-tail search traffic. I’m keen on blog development, I see content as a crucial strategy to good organic SEO. The benefits are plenty to a website, especially when it is hosted on the end of a domain.

The one thing about a number of blog posts is the traffic it can collectively bring. Often SEO campaigns are started with keyword research and this involves picking out industry terms to rank for. All well and good but an additional content strategy can supplement this. The crux of it is, the shorter phrases have more competition and are harder to rank for whilst the longer phrases aren’t as competitive and as a whole provide a large number of visitors.

[notice] The long tail of search refers to keywords which individually have few queries and therefore are less competitive than the most popular industry keywords, yet the cumulative searches for long tail terms can provide a high amount of traffic. [/notice]

I recently analysed the long tail search of website to understand just how much it was benefiting from long tail search queries. From this analysis, I was able to construct a few graphs highlighting the distribution of visits per keyword and the long tail queries alongside the number of visits.

Its quite obvious from the above, with around 70% of traffic coming from long tail search terms, that the website isn’t ranking very highly for its main keywords is benefiting from lots of long tail search. :-)

Industry Trophy Keyword Terms

Conveniently, I have recently read a few posts outlining how they were ranking for high industry terms yet gaining a lot of their traffic through their content strategy.

I’ve swiped the below graphs (hoping he wont mind) from the newly crowned most influential UK SEO, Shaun from Hobo-Web, who wrote about the concept of “sisyphean” and targeting the long tail of search by adding more content with evidence from his Google Analytics showing traffic statistics.

The highest I ranked for SEO in Google (UK) was no3 (the spike below indicates the time) and the quality of leads I got wasn’t that great.

You can see how the keyword “seo” has brought in a 1000+ visits to his website but the below shows the long tail of search and a content strategy in full flow as shows instead of just one keyword, he has 40,000+ keywords bringing in thousands of visits (excluding website/brand terms?).

This isn’t to say don’t bother with your main keywords! Just remember there is another aspect of SEO to think of so do both – depending on your resources. Whilst the top terms are good to rank for people seem to be of the opinion that they are trophy terms. Who doesn’t want to appear top of the pile? Especially for a term like SEO – I was at Just Search whilst they were top of the pile for it, definitely good for the sales lads to point out to clients. Remember, these type of terms are competitive and you can slide up & down – I noticed before it was the first time I’ve ever seen Just Search not on page 1 of the SERP’s for SEO, even though they have climbed back up.

This type of post is pretty popular and has been explained many times before but its good to cover it in a growing industry, there are plenty of people (especially clients) that may not have come across this aspect of SEO and its rather apt for this post – I’m hoping this blog can head in a similar direction.

Oh, I know, I’ve linked out from my SEO blog…. I don’t mind handing out a bit of link love to good resources and blogs, its a good thing and people should link out a little more rather than hoard any link juice. Just saying.