Monthly Archives: October 2009

Twitter: It’s Not Just for Bored Celebrities

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Earlier this month, I visited Auckland to give a presentation at Search Engine Bootcamp (see pic of me womaning the Search Engine College sponsor table).

It was a good opportunity to catch up with fellow geeks including Mark Lincoln of Hot PJ Web Design, Mark Sceats of SureFire Search Marketing, Gary Jensen New Zealand’s first blogger and General Manager of NZS.com and Rod Jacka of PanAnalysis. I didn’t have a chance to catch up with him one-on-one, but it was also inspirational to be in the audience listening to Simon Young of iJump Ltd.

My topic was originally titled Twitter Marketing Essentials but I found that a little uninspired, so with the help of the Twitterverse, re-titled my presentation to: Twitter – It’s Not Just for Bored Celebrities.

The presentation was about how businesses of all sizes can use Twitter as an effective marketing tool and have a lot of fun doing it.

In the presentation, I use a lot of examples of companies who are getting it right on Twitter, as well as some who are getting it very wrong indeed.

Some of the businesses mentioned in my presentation include:

  • Air New Zealand
  • Hell Pizza
  • ProBlogger
  • Tony and Alba’s Pizza
  • Costa Vida Mexican Restaurants
  • TVNZ
  • Best Blooms
  • The Wine Vault

Feel free to download the Powerpoint Slideshow.

I’m not allowed to post the entire file, but here is a 10 minute audio snippet from my presentation (right click to download or left click to listen).

Have been skipping blog duty

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Just a quick post to say sorry for the lack of content on the blog over the past week or so, but I’ve been skipping school.

I’ve been indulging in a bit of rest and recreation with the family, touring around New Zealand after speaking at Search Engine Bootcamp in Auckland.

Apart from a few nights in Auckland, we went sight-seeing in rainy Wellington (where I introduced my son to the wonders of Te Papa), hiking the hills in Motueka, shell-collecting in Golden Bay, wine-tasting in Blenheim and soaking in Hanmer Springs where we had the bizarre and delightful experience of sitting in the hot thermal pools while it snowed on our heads!

See the picture of the pools included in this post.

Anyway, I’ve got lots of new blog material to share, a wrap of  Search Engine Bootcamp and a few Q and A’s coming up this week, so stay tuned.

Q and A : Is there anything I can do to improve the chance of Google displaying sitelinks for my site?

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QuestionDear Kalena…

I’d love to have Sitelinks shown when people search for my site on Google. Is there anything I can do to improve the chance of Google displaying sitelinks for my site?

Thanks
Matthew

Dear Matthew

Shirley has also asked about this, so hopefully the following information will help answer both your queries.

To borrow a quote from Google’s Webmasters/Site owners Help about sitelinks:

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

From this we can take two important points – firstly, you need a good, SEO-friendly navigation / architecture for your site.

Assuming you know about sitelinks and are reading an SEO blog, you’d most likely already have this in place… so the second thing to work on is convincing Google your site is useful.

There are two main ways to accomplish this:

  1. By focusing on building good deep links to your most important internal pages
  2. By increasing the click-through rate (and reducing the bounce rate) to the pages you want to have as a sitelink

One way to improve the click-through rates, deep link to a few of your pages and convince the big G which pages are the most important is by putting a strong call-to-action on your homepage’s body content and then linking to each of these core pages.

Even with all this, there’s still no guarantees that you’ll get sitelinks, but it should help.

If anyone else has any advice or feedback about sitelinks, let us know in the comments.

Cheers

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation