Wow! Why is it that all the disasters seem to happen in January, or right at the end of December so that all of January overshadowed by them?

Using Our Skills to Help…

The SEO community, along with all the other communities on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels, quickly started using whatever skills they possess to get the word out and help with what’s going on in Haiti right now. The poorest country in the Western hemisphere was struck by a powerful  7.0 earthquake on January 12 with a devastating result that is still only just emerging.

Last year it was the attacks on Gaza. which began on December 27 2008 and dampened our spirits throughout the month of January, also triggering a massive social media response. Before that, on December 26, 2004, the entire world was shocked at the worst Tsunami in history which caused an earth-shattering level of death and destruction in the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. Indonesia bore the brunt, and over a quarter of a million people lost their lives, although some estimates put the number much higher.

Step Back and Take a Deep Breath

It’s sometimes hard to focus on the good that is all around us at times like these. But I have personally been moved to tears by some of the truly great selfless acts I have witnessed over the past few days.

That’s why I especially appreciate efforts on the part of my Twitter friends to raise awareness and funds to help the people of Haiti. They are unstinting and as of January 16, social media efforts together had raised an amazing US8 million for Haiti relief.

A Wall Street Journal article pinpointed the many ways in which Twitter has been particularly useful to worldwide efforts to help the people of Haiti. Twitter and Facebook have been used for locating lost relatives, raising awareness on the magnitude of this disaster, and even coordinating relief efforts.

Here are some of the millions of Tweets that are focusing on Hait right now:

Elsewhere on the Web…

Google Crisis Response page

Hatian-Americans turn to Facebook in search for loved ones.

& Midnight Moguls is Born

I am particularly excited, and honored, to be part of a wonderful movement just being started up by Scott ‘Social Media’ Allen @ScottAllanto help those who are out of work due to the sagging economy right now.

He set up Midnight Moguls as a hub where in return for an offer of help for those affected by the present economic crisis you get a little promotion by Midnight Mogul members. Please support us and spread the word to people you know, especially on Twitter.

In addition to helping out over at the Midnight Moguls website, I am offering resume-editing for anyone looking for a job right now. You can Tweet me @ISpeakSEOif you want more info.

What can you give back to the community?

I hate to admit this but…

This is going to have to be one of my occasional posts about me. If you’re not new here, you may have noticed I haven’t posted for a while.

I’ll be painfully honest with you: I’ve been thinking seriously about what it’s all about online, with social media and everything.

You know how sometimes you get all introspective and start comparing yourself negatively with everyone? That’s where I’ve been this past week.

You see, from my perspective, and despite the fact that I know as much as any social media expert, everyone seems to be having a far better time on social media than I am. Social media has become a chore, notwithstanding my truly outstanding connections. Here are a few of the reasons why.

I may have mentioned this before, but FaceBook is driving me nuts with all those phony-feeling applications. And I’m totally not surprised about the recent revelations that FaceBook quizzes can be dangerous, by exposing too much about you to those with criminal intent.

FaceBook? Yep. I feel so bad. I want to go down that list of stuff waiting for my attention and click ‘ignore, ignore, ignore….’

It all feels so fake. Same with my Twitter account. I loved it to start with, and I am reluctant to part company with my precious Twitter account. But now I get this awful hollow feeling from reading tweets that don’t interest me from people I don’t even like in some cases. And yes, I do unfollow. It feels as if we’ve all missed the point of social networking.

Digg–so many people never even bother to try and network: all they want is my Digg. Same with Mixx, although it’s still more friendly over there.

Experts have been telling us from the beginning (well the genuine ones anyway) that we need to make our social media connections count. It’s all about being mutually relevant and having a good feeling about those you interact with.

Applications like TwitterGrader, while they certainly have a place in social networking, have also contributed to the negative feelings that many of us are experiencing. Far too many Twitter and FaceBook users, along with users of most of the other social media sites out there, are wildly connecting all over the place, sometimes with people they’ll never even interact with once, in order to get a better grade. Where’s the logic in that?

I despise the fact that some people are proud of having connections with 30,000 people. What for? To me it’s missing the point altogether.

If you think I’ve lost it, look here: Seth Godin is saying the same thing here:

I’m going to take a deep breath and ignore all the social media grading applications out there from now on. I want to get back the sincerity of my social media networking: networking because you like the people, because you can be of sincere help to each other, and because overall you’re contributing to making the Net a better place.

Going through all my social media accounts and pruning them will return me to sanity. It will cut hours off the time I need to spend servicing those accounts at present. It will make those moments of true networking, the ones that carry you through a bad week, inspire you to move upwards and onward, and generally make you feel it’s all worth it after all, far more likely to happen. and that, after all, is why we’re here. Isn’t it?

I hope that you’ll agree with me and decide to at least take a step toward doing the same thing. Let’s make social media meaningful once more before it’s too late.

Ever noticed how sometimes a few straggling birdies get left behind each year when all the others are migrating to better climates? Chances are those that get left behind end up not making it at all.

I hate to be a drama queen (not known for it), but if you are stubborn about not getting involved with twitter, you might just find yourself wishing you’d joined the rest of the flock, especially if you work online.

I know there are a number of online personalities who, like me in the beginning, see twitter as just one more social-media drain on our time, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on that score. I’m now a self-confessed twitter-holic.

The twitter world is fast developing into a hub for the various industries. All you need do to ensure permanent access to professional opinions, great company, and breaking news, is open an account and search for all the people in your industry you wish you had access to. You’ll probably be surprised how many are already on twitter. Join as many communities you want, and you’re all set.

Remember though, that if you want to use twitter for family and friends too, you’d be better off opening more than one account so that your professional associates can’t end up reading your family small talk.

Like many others in the SEO industry in particular, I’ve discovered that twitter is wonderful for keeping me in touch with what’s going on. We’re even privy to breaking news as it’s actually breaking, and I love hearing about stuff before anyone else does!

There are a number of twitter clients designed to help you get the most of your micro-blogging experience. Instead of exhausting (and boring) myself, I’m going to send you over to this brilliant list. That should be plenty to keep you going for a while. My favorite (and the only one I use) is Twhirl. It’s easy, non-intrusive, meaning I can work while I’m using it, and it seems to have few bugs. In the bargain, you can log onto multiple accounts and read them all from the same tiny window. Brilliant.

My one pet peeve with Twhirl, however, was that it opened links in IE instead of FireFox, which is my default browser. I tweeted about it a couple of times but no one answered my cries for help. Then yesterday Andy Beard encountered the same problem, so my eyes were glued to his tweets until he came up with an answer, which I knew he would. So it is with full credit going to Andy that I present to you the solution here! I’m so happy that now when I click on a link in a tweet, it comes up in FireFox. I HATE IE!

Just in case any twitter people get to read this, one thing both twitter and Twhirl are lacking is an efficient search mechanism. If you just know you saw a tweet about something important a few days ago, you can’t find it in search (well not reliably). You need to go back through all the tweets, which can be an extreme headache, particularly if you’re pushed for time which we all are.

But I love twitter, and even the attractions of FriendFeed can’t lure me away, well not for now anyway.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t miss the twitter migration?’ It seems to me that at some point they’ll probably have to change the rules for twitter, when it gets too big to manage in its present format. Maybe there will come a time when you can’t just decide to ‘follow’ any person of your choice. For me this is a totally valid reason to get in now before things do change (of course, then again they might not). And then there’s always the fact that some pretty impressive individuals are still willing to follow you back. Once they’ve got upwards of 10,000 followers that’s unlikely to be the case.

Oh, and if you love the little birdie with attitude featured in the twitter logo, you’ll be impressed to know that it’s the work of another twitter-holic, non other than cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void.

If you want to start somewhere, follow me on twitter!

Guide to Networking with twitter
There’s no shortage of social networking sites online. In fact, if you’re like me you sort of get a sinking feeling every time you see that another one has been launched. It’s getting overwhelming. And worse, most of them are a total waste of time; a short flash-in-the-pan that fades away to nothing.

I actually thought twitter was going to be like that. Boy was I in for a surprise. I never thought this tiny, simple micro-blogging application would soon be the one I use more than any other. In fact, twitter has a way of growing on you, and now I see it as my most useful networking tool: I can easily choose who I network with. I have even been getting backlinks from twitter, and a small amount of traffic (hey, traffic is never to be sneezed at, especially if it’s targeted).

It would be churlish of me to try and create a twitter resource without making reference to others who have done a far better job than I might have done:

Let’s start with this ‘how to’ guide from New Media Bytes. It tells you all you need to know to get twittering in the shortest amount of time. I should mention that it was intended for journalists, but bloggers and just about anyone else will find it very useful too.

Second up we have Lee Odden over at Top Rank Blog with a pretty comprehensive twitter guide.

This list of SEO twitterers is the work of MarketingPilgrim, and you’re going to love it if you’re at all interested in SEO.

That should be more than enough to get you started on twitter. Now tell me you don’t love it?

Stumbleupon: How to Get Tons of Traffic in One Easy Lesson

Stumbleupon quickly became my all-time favorite once I reinstalled it last year. I say reinstalled because I dabbled with it some years ago when it was new on the web, but couldn’t see a purpose for it at the time. Wrong again. When I began using it this time, I noticed a curious thing just a few days after I installed it: a huge spike in my web traffic. I couldn’t understand it–about a thousand visitors from nowhere. When I investigated, every single one of them had come from Stumbleupon. I was excited about this discovery–so much free traffic at absolutely no cost–it deserved to be investigated.

Oh, just one word of caution here: I actually had to change my hosting provider once I started using Stumbleupon because they closed me down a couple of times saying I had used up all my bandwidth. Don’t burn traffic by not being prepared for it when it comes with plenty of usable bandwidth.

You can be sure this nugget of information piqued my interest: The more active you are on Stumbleupon, the more traffic you get. So you can even control how much traffic you get. But you can’t just go in there and spam members. If you do you run the risk of getting buried, or worse. Be sure you’re doing it right: read these highly informative articles about using Stumbleupon before you even download the Stumbleupon toolbar. This one is for Firefox, but you’ll find the IE version there too.

Here’s an explanation of how to use Stumblupon like a Pro that should put you in a great place to start stumbling right away.

Tamar Weinberg wrote this Stumbleupon How-to guide for 10e2 a year ago, but it’s well worth a trip over to read it.

Andy Wibbels wrote this article about how to find great websites using Stumbleupon, and this is useful information too.

OK, so now you know why you should be using twitter and Stumbleupon. Don’t forget to follow me (I’ll reciprocate) on twitter, and be my friend on Stumbleupon. See you there.

Want to know what’s the single most important thing you can do to increase your conversion and grow your business? No, I’m not about to sell you on some insane program. This is vital stuff that you can and should be doing for low-cost or free.

Again and again search marketers tell their clients that they really, really need to track everything they do. Sadly a lot of the time this sage advice falls on deaf ears. If you’re new to the business the whys and wherefores of tracking everything you do online can be missed, to be sure.

But this subject is worth grappling with and I can’t think of a better example than Facebook, which is now worth a whopping $15 billion according to the (very reasonable) calculations of Danny Dover over at SEOmoz.org

Just for the sake of comparison, MySpace changed hands in 2005 for a mere $580 million, yet it has been around for much longer than Facebook, which is only five years old, and the MySpace user base was over 100 million as of 2006.

Now why should Facebook be worth so much more than any of the other social networking sites?

It’s all down to tracking. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tracked everything his members do and stored that information.

So what?

Well just think for a moment how much more effective it would be if you wanted to place an ad on Facebook, and you could choose the age and gender of your target market. Not only that, but you could match your product to their interests (just to mention a few simple parameters of search). Just think how much you could increase your conversion rate by knowing these details and being able to target in this way.

Well, that’s the secret. That’s why advertising on Facebook is likely to be so much more effective than advertising on any of the other social marketing sites.

Now, almost certainly this information is going to have you rushing out to arrange for tracking of your site. Good idea. But before you do it take the time to shop around. If your web hosting doesn’t provide you with a range of comprehensive tracking tools (mine does: the button to HostGator is to your right over there), then go and sign up immediately with Google Analytics. Its free, you can track as many sites as you want, and you can even set some goals for yourself over there.

Stay tuned for a post on the best tracking tools out there in the next day or two.