Not to mention that the visits came more often than visits from internal links, resulting in less than an hour on average while visits through internal links often took up to 14 hours to send the bots.  The study went on to double check that the Twitter Googlebot visits were indexing pages, and they were. 
 
While some results were off, possibly due to variables used in the study, the end conclusion was that it was possible to index websites using Twitter accounts, and it may be a good way to speed up the indexing of newer pages as well as index links that cannot be found internally. 

Whether Google or Twitter catches wind of these sitemapping tricks in the future and makes moves to get rid of them or make them obsolete, for now it seems to be working.  Not to mention this is another interesting addition to recent speculations about nofollow links and their role in search engine optimization. Read about the study for yourself and check out data graphs at SEOmoz Article.

It is crucial that you spend some time doing research on the Internet marketing company that you choose. There are many different SEO strategies and techniques that can be offered to you and there are many companies out there just waiting to take you for all you can afford. While there are many different SEO techniques, there are some that are more beneficial than others.

Do not fall in the trap of paying for more than you really need or by signing a contract with a company that does not know the first thing about true SEO marketing. Consider the following questions and tips before hiring an SEO Internet marketing company.

• Ask for references and check those references.
• Make sure the company will fit your style and mission statement.
• Make sure to talk to the person who will be handling your account. Many times, you will be assigned to someone else. It is imperative that you both have a good understanding and will be able to connect with each other.
• Find out how often reports will be sent to you.
• Ask how long before you will see tangible results. If a company tells you that you will see results within a month, this is not possible. It generally takes at least a good six months before you will see positive results. SEO is a slow process, yet very reliable.
• The SEO firm you choose should be able to not only provide SEO services to your company, but should be able to follow their own advice. Search to see where that company shows up on the organic rankings.

If you are smart and do your homework, you will be knowledgeable enough to hire an SEO Internet marketing company with the satisfaction that you are not being conned into spending money that is not necessary. Campaigns can run from $1,000 to $100,000. Many companies will offer SEO services ala carte. When you choose to go ala carte, you will not be guaranteed traffic.

In fact, beware of any company that guarantees results quickly and that guarantees you will rank on the first page of any search engine. It is likely that if you choose to go full steam ahead with an Internet marketing plan that you could end up on the first page. However, no Internet marketing company can guarantee this.

Myth #1: Meta tags are all equally important.

Fact: Some Meta tags are useful, but others may not be relevant. These days, search engines are more concerned with the content that is on the website, rather than what Meta tags have been chosen for the site.

Myth #2: All SEO is expensive.

Fact: SEO is like just about anything. There is expensive SEO and SEO for the bootstrapping budget. You just have to know what to look for and what SEO techniques will best benefit you. Organic SEO is less expensive to set up and many aspects of it can be free. A PPC campaign or banner advertising can be more expensive because you pay for clicks or impressions. With SEO, the clicks do not cost a thing.

Myth #3: Sites should be submitted to search engines weekly or monthly.

Fact: You should only have to submit your site to a search engine once. The search engines will come back. To speed up the process of getting your site indexed, link it to a high traffic or high PR site. Your URL will be found by the search engines and will be indexed automatically.

Myth #4: Providing content on the site is all that is needed to rank well.

Fact: This is one myth to avoid at all costs. You must provide quality SEO content off site with the proper keyword density. Providing backlinks to your site is critical to ranking well with Google and many other search engines.

Myth #5: Competitive keywords and phrases are not recommended.

Fact: It is imperative that you utilize the keywords that everyone is using, as the people searching for your topic or product are likely typing in that keyword. It is recommended that you use a variety of high, medium, and low competitive key phrases.

Myth #6: Natural SEO is not as effective as PPC.

Fact: While this could actually be a true statement for the short term, in the long term it is not true. This is because people tend to trust the information found in organic searches rather than for information that is paid for on a per click basis.

Now that you are aware of the top six SEO myths, you are better prepared to create a SEO marketing campaign that will truly benefit you.

Your Site may not be being Indexed

Although your Google Webmaster Tools Reports shows you are being indexed, it is not always a reliable source. You need to dig a little further to make sure your URL is being ranked. To do this, simply use your traffic analytics tool to see if there have been any Google search referrals to this page. If your page is being ranked, then this is not the problem.

Insufficient and Low Quality Content

It is important to provide high quality content. High quality content is basically enough pertinent information about the topic that will be of use to a visitor. While your content may be valuable information, it is also important that you provide enough content. A few sentences will not do the trick, even if you update it every day. Try to provide at least 250 to 500 words of high quality content.

Your Site may be too New

Google automatically considers new sites to be “under suspicion”. It does not want to store the information of sites that are not accurate and are not providing quality information. All you can do is continue to add quality content, so you can earn its trust.

You may not have enough Links pointing to your Domain

Googlebot visits websites and continues to spider the links on the page. Therefore, Googlebot will not index your site until there is at least one link that points to your domain name. Here are some ways to get some backlinks:

• Write a press release about the launch of your website and submit it to press release websites.
• Write articles and submits to the top article directories. Be sure to include your link in the author resource box.
• Create a blog linking back to your website.
• Join niche forums. Set up the link to your domain in the signature and make some posts.

These are just a few ways that your site can be indexed badly. If your site is being indexed badly and you provide high quality and updated content, be sure to do some investigating.

There are certain things I’ve noticed over the years when it comes to people and how they behave on websites. This information I’ve put to use in different SEO projects and I thought I’d share it with you all to help you gain some insight into how SEO firms can use human behavior to help them design better sites.

When we humans find something familiar, we tend to stick with it.

We tend to like to find patterns in things; it’s just part of how our brains operate. Knowing this we can design anchor text and link bait more effectively by trying to incorporate a surprise or some element of mystery. Surprise is one method of passing along content – the phrase “did you know?” has a unique ability to raise linkability.

Experience Drives Current Behavior

People tend to put more weight on personal experiences and recent events. In the SEO world this can be used to get people to link or buy something from your site. Perhaps make the site look like another famous site that people tend to visit, or if you are trying to build links why not mention a link on the target site that they already have that is oddly familiar to the one you are promoting. You’d be surprised how well this works!

Optimism and Confidence

People tend to be overly optimistic about their personal futures. The big takeaway here is when dealing with a client engaging your SEO services keep in mind they tend to think that their project somehow is going to always defy all the rules and outperform everyone else. It’s up to you to make sure you keep their expectations in check.

We Like Things The Same, Day In, Day Out

People don’t like to lose, and conversely people like things to stay the way they are if given the choice. The “status quo” is good enough for many of us.

If you can get someone to sign up for a recurring service, a newsletter or a yearly subscription the chances are high they will stick with it. Once you’ve Human behavior can be tricky to understand, but by observing how we behave we can actually learn some pretty useful SEO tricks to take advantage of human nature.the status quo will benefit your site. Give visitors to the website as many chances as possible to convert, purchase, subscribe, etc.

Prime the Pump

If you ask someone a question about something, and then follow up with them within the next day or two about the same subject chances are if your follow-up requires a choice, people will make the positive choice – be that purchasing, donating, etc.

Start relationships with your visitors through surveys or newsletters and then always follow-up with those that participate a few days later. You will see much higher conversion rates for those you follow-up with in a timely manner versus those that you come back to weeks later.

What you may not have realized, though, is your site might have been the reason it took so long for all pages to get indexed. Google bots index some sites faster than others and that is attributed to SEO practices. If you use poor SEO strategies, your site will take longer to index. Run a check of your site and make sure you are using the best SEO techniques.

Check Your Sitemap

Your sitemap must be correct if Google is going to crawl all pages in your site. Don’t just create a sitemap using an automated plug-in without checking it. It has to be right or it will not get the job done. Remember, if you add pages to your site, you need to update your sitemap.

Contextual Linking

Interlinking pages is a great way to tip the Google bots off to the additional pages. Put contextual links on your site and use them as a way to direct the Google bots to other pages in your site.

Use Simplicity

A complex directory will give the Google bots a headache. Keep it simple so the bots can easily crawl through the site and index all pages.

In addition, keep your navigation bars simple. You might think complex navigation bars enhance your site, but what they actually do is confuse the bots. Keep it simple and reap the benefits.

Update Often

Update your site often so Google will know you are a frequent updated. Google will put you on a schedule for crawling. If you make a lot of changes, Google might move your schedule up. This can help you with the waiting game.

You need to make your site as friendly to the Google bots as possible. You will not have a problem getting indexed if you use proper SEO strategies. Make sure you have all strategies in place so your site can get indexed quickly.

It’s the same thing in the SEO world. Try as we might to get good rank using tried and tested methods, sometimes it’s tempting – perhaps even a bit necessary – to engage in risky SEO behavior to see if you can’t fool the big guys – namely Google. We know what will happen if we get caught buying links or buying placement, but it all comes down to a risk vs. reward structure: How much risk am I willing to take given the reward (placement, conversions, etc.) I get?

So we are adults here, so let’s be honest – we all engage in this risky behavior now and again in the SEO world. It’s just something that – well, it’s something every SEO professional does. The question is, how can we engage in this behavior with the least amount of risk?

Link buying, paying to have posts (especially negative) removed or altered and buying hosted content are the three things that rate high on the SEO risk meter. So let’s talk about how to put some distance between you and what you are trying to do.

First, when you engage in this type of activity keep in mind that some sites may turn around and report you directly. Lesson #1 is never reveal your domain or who you are until you’ve felt out the contact on the other end. Find out if they are interested first, then worry about the details (like who and what) later.

Second, don’t try this with the big guys – this type of behavior is better suited for niche markets, and not for the Internet Top 10. As you work in your market space over time you will get to know other players in the market, and can use that information to build relationships that help you push the envelope a little. Just remember, it has to be beneficial to both parties!

Finally, if they don’t respond to your request (you did use a generic e-mail right, such as a @gmail or @hotmail account?) or they turn you down, then cease communications there. Do not try and get other sites to change their minds or go back every few weeks and try again. This is a sure fire way to get them upset and for you to find yourself in hot water with the search engines if they report you and they can figure out what domains you are with.

While I certainly don’t encourage anyone to engage in risky SEO practices, I do realize that sometimes it is necessary for certain reasons. Just be sure to keep some distance between you and the other sites so you always have enough room to plausibly deny being involved. After all, it only takes one time for you to be exposed to send your domain into a nosedive with the search engines.

1 – Keyword Stuffing

It’s hard to believe people are still doing this, but it happens. When a page doesn’t rank naturally high for a keyword they will often try and stuff keywords into the page to make it rank higher. Not only does this not work, but it also makes your content fall to near worthless.

2 – Repetitive Keyword Targeting

So you’re not stuffing the keywords into your content, but are you targeting the same keyword on every page? Avoid using the same keywords over and over for multiple pages throughout your site. Focus on creating content that matches your subject matter and target audience and forget about trying to rig the search engines – jus to follow good SEO practices and let your quality content do the rest!

3 – Blocking Bots

It’s hard to rank when you are blocking the very guys who are trying to rank you! Instead of blocking off parts of your site to content that might not be 100% up to snuff, use nofollow tags for the links to alert the search engine bots that you don’t think the content is worthy.

4 – Not Using XML Sitemaps

Every search engine worth talking about uses XML sitemaps nowadays, so you need to make sure that you provide one and that it is updated with every change to your site. It’s a great way to get noticed and get ranked with little effort.

5 – Thinking Google is the Only Game in Town

So many people fall into the trap of thinking that Google is the only search engine in town. Just think about it – if you could increase your traffic from Live Search by 15% how much would that add to the bottom line? Get your site registered for the webmaster tools from the other big search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.

6 – Avoiding Google Webmaster Tools

Remember, we didn’t say ignore Google! Make sure you get registered with Google webmaster tools if for no other reason than to get some really good data about what is working and what isn’t with your site and keywords.

7 – Falling into the DoFollow Trap

Way too many sites are chasing after blogs and other sites that always follow links. Of course, we all know what happens to content that is linked like this – it becomes another link farm and your site will suffer the consequences.

8 – Submitting Articles for Links

It’s great to be known as the expert in something and have your articles linked to and features on prominent sites. It’s another thing to submit the same content to sites over and over again. The search engines devalue content that is found all over the place. Remember your best content should always be on your site – and when you do submit content to other sites chose sites that are worthy of the value your content provides.

9 – Placing too much Faith in Google’s Link Command

I can’t tell you how many people that rely on the Google link command as the authority of what is linking to and what isn’t for their site. While it’s a useful tool, it shouldn’t be thought of as more than just a tool – not the final authority.

10 – Blocking Bots from Duplicate Content

This falls in line with #3, with a twist. People are often afraid that duplicate content is the worse things they can have. While it’s true that it can cause a penalty in rankings, blocking bots is likely to do more harm than good. Consider instead using 301 redirects for such content.

11 – Splitting Content

So you have great content and instead of concentrating it on your primary domain you end up using it across multiple domains and just totally devalue the content. The days of sitting up link farms and link islands are long over. You always should focus your effort on your primary domain and avoid splitting content over multiple domains.

12 – Linking “Just Because”

Otherwise known as reciprocal linking, this practice has been showing up again after being dead for a few years. It’s when you have pages or even entire sites that do nothing but link back to other sites that have agreed to link to you. It’s bad and shouldn’t be done – period.

The nofollow directive in links has always been a safety net of sorts. You could use it to link to contact outside your pages that might come from an unknown source, and it was the accepted standard to linking to your own content so that the search engines didn’t believe you were link stuffing. Search engines pretty much adhered to nofollow directives and all was well.

Today, we face a much different environment. It all started with Wikipedia in some ways. By default, Wikipedia nofollows all outbound links on its site – in other words, the site isolates itself from the rest of the Internet. Plenty of people are linking in, but from the search engines point of view they aren’t linking out. Yet SEO professionals noticed something rather interesting about this arrangement. Wikipedia consistently ranks near the top for a lot of search queries. Was this “black hole” actually being rewarded by the search engines? Or could it be that the search engines were ignoring the nofollow tags altogether?

Before an answer was found for that question another wave of links without the nofollow directive hit through the micro-blogging sites. Since almost all of the micro-blogging sites require users to “host” their micro-blogs on their sites the #1 rule of blogging was broken – host your content on your own domain. Because of this the links to that content started pouring in. People were linking up to Twitter feeds and Tumblr posts left and right, and almost nobody was using the nofollow directive. It didn’t matter to the average user if they trusted the person or not, they were just interested in linking to the content for their own purposes.

A third scenario popped up as well, led by the Wikipedia example above – people started to nofollow all links from their sites to replicate the success Wikipedia had. So now we had three situations where nofollow was coming into play:

• To isolate sites entirely from outbound links.
• Ignoring it completely because of the popularity of sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
• Search engines choosing to ignore nofollow and following anyway.

Have you kept up? It’s a nightmare for anyone engaged in SEO to try and figure some of this out!

To throw another twist into the mix, recent tests have shown that sites that have nothing but nofollow links pointing to them are actually ranking. This gives credibility to the theory that search engines are choosing to ignore the directives.

So how can you use all these findings to make your sites better and to increase your rank? Simply put, it’s something where right now there is no clear answer. You should continue to use the nofollow directive as you have in the past for paid links and such, but when it comes to social networking sites you may want to drop it altogether. You may want to try several different versions of pages to see which ones ranks better trying a combination of nofollow directives. Questions like this make the perfect scenario for A/B testing.

If you want to get more information about Search Engine Optimization, we invite you to visit our SEO FAQ and subscribe our feed in our SEO Blog.

So why is worrying about rank alone a wasteful exercise? Let’s start out by saying that yes, it is important to be on that first page and hopefully near the top – but let’s face it, not all of us can be #1 all the time. Here are so many factors that can affect where you rank at any given moment of the day. There may be a big news story of the day that is taking up screen real estate and affecting rankings for the keyword you are targeting. It could be a geographical problem – you are #1 in St. Louis, but #3 from Quebec. Search results vary by location as the engines try to deliver the most relevant results for the keywords and location of their customers.

It could even be the data center that is returning the results, or the new code that Google is testing out for their engine. Things that you have no control over and as a result have no consistent method to address as an issue.

A more accurate measure of how well you are doing in the rankings is to look at how much traffic your site is getting. Sure, you may be ranked 3rd but if you are getting a large volume of traffic (and hopefully converting the traffic into revenue-generating activities) then you could very well be doing better than the #1 and #2 results. This is why it is so important to implement segmenting on your website through tools such as Google Analytics so you can analyze how certain segments of your website – such as revenue generating activities – are doing. It helps eliminate the noise from the dollars!

Once you get a handle on search engine traffic and conversions, then you can start looking at merging that data with ranking data to look for correlations. Suppose you have a spike in traffic – was there a noticeable change in rank? Or was it due to non-organic methods? Correlating the two data sources help you know where the traffic is coming from and what type of traffic it is.

As you continue to develop your SEO skills and manage your web properties and clients it is important that you (and your customers) understand the difference between rankings and traffic. You can help your clients better understand how to interpret the data when you start by knowing how to analyze the data effectively.

Just remember Avis (the rental car company) and their slogan – “No. 2. So we try harder”. Then ask yourself if you need to work harder on your site, or is #2 producing the traffic and revenue that you and your clients desire?