WebForSuccess

Twitter Ramps up for Business with Twitter 101 At Business.Twitter.com

Twitter has just released a guide for business use of Twitter they call "Twitter 101".  This resides on a new subdomain http://business.twitter.com.  This new focus makes it official that Twitter is not just for "what are you doing?" any more.  It is a web 2.0 business tool and Twitter realizes that embracing the business use of Twitter will eventually go a long way toward making Twitter pay.  This will be a developing story over the next months and years, and we look forward to "following" the story.

As Twitter says in the guide, "Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter."

The guide begins by covering getting started and "learning the lingo" which help businesses new to Twitter come up to speed, and then moves on to best practices and case studies which are the meat for businesses currently using Twitter to glean additional strategies for further leveragining their presence on the platform.  The case studies include companies like Dell, Jet Blue, Pepsi and smaller companies and the innovative ways they are leveraging the social site.

Twitter 101 concludes with a valuable resource section that includes books, other sites and pertinent blog posts for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Another interesting tidbit is that there is now a link in the footer of every page on Twitter labeled "business" that takes you directly to Twitter 101, A Special Guide

Stay tuned.  This is just the start of the "monetization" of Twitter, which some will mourn, but we welcome as a Web 2.0 marketing tool for retail ecommerce sites.

Top 5 Google SEO Resources - Straight from the Source

Do you think of Google as a great big scary black box when it comes to their search engine rankings even though their corporate motto is "don't be evil"?  What you may not realize is that Google offers some great resources in both video and printed form covering a variety of topics that will help you design websites and create content that will maximize your results with both search engines and visitors (and ultimately, paying customers).

1. If you are relatively new to SEO (search engine optimization), you MUST read Google's Guide to Search Engine Optimization this is a regularly updated guide that gives advice directly from Google on the organization of you site and url, along with best practices and do's and dont's.   If you have been working on your site SEO for years, you still need to review this so you know Google's current thinking.

2. Matt Cutts Blog Matt has been a Google employee since 2000 and is currently head of their Webspam team.  He's an active blogger, and his posts often attract hundreds of comments, to which he often responds with additional valuable nuggets. When he talks about Google ranking, and their search algorithm, you want to listen. 

3. The Google Webmaster Channel on youtube http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp Lots of videos here, pick a short, single topic one, or a comprehensive one like the Google Trifecta Video, a one hour video that covers the Webmaster Central tool, Analytics and testing with Website Optimizer and how they can work together to max results from your site

4. The official Google Webmaster Central Blog with hundreds of articles covering tips, techniques and webmaster tools to optimize your site.

5. The Google Webmaster Help Forum You can post questions here, and get feedback from community members and from Googlers (Google employees) whose posts are flagged with a blue G logo.

Google really has an interest in having your site found when it has good content that people will be interested in.  This is in their best interests and yours.  So try to get on the same page and deliver great content, and follow their logical guidelines and you'll have a big leg up on traffic and results.

If you've got a quick few minutes, here's a great basic  5 minute SEO video from Matt Cutts of Google  

The payoff from effective website design and optimization can be huge if you get a traffic boost from the search engines and it results in increased sales.  Spend some time honing your skills and create a game plan to devote some time each week to this task.

Best Practices for Obsolete Ecommerce Pages on Your Site

You've been running an ecommerce site for several years.  You have hundreds or thousands of products.

What's the best practice to use when a product is discontinued?

• What is best for search engine optimization (SEO)
• What is best for your customers
• What is best for you (a combination of the above 2, in other words, maximize revenue.

Well, what if I just leave all my old pages up with a note that the product is discontinued?  Well that won't  create a lot of conversions.  Also, search engines are pretty smart and they may realize that pages without a buy button aren't as valuable for searchers as those with.

Also, most search engines will only index a certain number of pages from your site, unless you have very high pagerank, i.e. an extremely high profile site with massive amounts of incoming links like Wikipedia.org.  Wouldn't you rather have your latest and greatest returned in searches than those items that customer can't buy?

The best possible approach is to intelligently program a  "301 redirect" for the obsolete page.  This will tell search engines that a page has permanently moved, and automatically forward the web browsing public transparently to the new page.  It's best in this case to forward the obsolete page to a page showing similar products, such as the category page for the product they tried to reach.  Here is a good article on programming 301 redirects for various hosting platforms and web languages.

The worst practice is to just remove the page and then provide a totally unhelpful generic "404 not found" page.  If you must do these, at least provide a custom 404 page with your logo and links back to the main page of your site. Here is a great resource for configuring 404 pages on your server (covers many server types)

Taking some time to work through this common problem and come up with a uniform, customer friendly solution can pay big dividends in the form of happier customers and better search engine results going forward.