OK, so twitter may be the worst thing that has happened since the invention of the Internet for productivity in the office (beating Facebook walls by a country mile), but it has its uses.

One of these uses is online reputation management. When we are looking at ways of putting across a consistent message for ourselves or our clients in the search engine results for a person or company name, we are looking for pages or websites that consistently have the ability to rank for names even among pretty serious competition. Twitter is an example of just such a service.

The structure of Twitter is well set up to pass its considerable domain weight to profile pages:

• Every tweet is it’s own page
• Other peoples tweets link to your profile page with your username as anchor text if they are replying to you (syntax = @username)
• Every person’s profile links to the profiles of people they follow

Therefore if you create a popular account that gets followed by lots of other popular accounts and people reply to you, you will end up with a profile page that has lots of internal links with good anchor text for your profile name. If your profile name is the name you want to end up ranking for, then you are well on your way.

Things to remember

• Make your username your real name or company name (whichever you are trying to rank for)
• Make sure your profile is public so that it ends up with rich, changing content and so you get links from other strong pages such as the timeline and upcoming

The power of this first occurred to me when I realised that my profile had jumped into the search results for my name, but a tiny amount of digging around shows that it’s true for even competitive searches such as Barack Obama.

Use social media responsibly

As with all social media marketing, I wouldn’t be the white hat I am if I didn’t point out that you should respect the rules of the forums you are playing in. In Twitter’s case, I think that’s probably mainly not spamming people.

But the point here is that this will work much better if you use Twitter ‘properly’ in the sense of using it for (even irregular) updates about yourself and/or your company. As I mentioned above, the power is used best when you get those keyword-rich internal links which happen when you get plenty of followers and hold conversations with people.

If you want to follow others in the office, the active twits are:

• Me: willcritchlow
• Duncan: duncanmorris
• Tom: tomcritchlow (Tom’s updates are protected, so good luck making it to ‘friend’ status ;))
• Lucy: langdog
• Andy: andyjamesdavies

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Reputation management has been hitting the headlines recently for all sorts of reasons. But what kind of reputation has ‘reputation management’ got?

Managing the reputation of a company in need (or teaching them how to do it themselves) is an attractive opportunity for those in the SEO business. However, there’s also no denying that the process itself is perfectly placed for a reputation slur.

From some viewpoints, Reputation Management is morally questionable; ‘covering stuff up’ is the most common criticism I’ve come across. Reputation Management is also the right kind of subject to be taken on by a jaded online community and shot down. There’s already a massive ‘anti-seo’ movement on some social media sites: the real irony would be if Reputation Management was itself to get a negative reputation.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Whether you have a solution to the potential problem, thoughts on why reputation management is a good (or bad) thing or just some ideas about reputation in general then comment below and let us know.

We’ve started the ball rolling with a few solutions/thoughts/ideas of our own:

• “A good reputation is more valuable than money”- Yes, yes it is. It can take literally years to build and can be threatened in days or hours by information that’s either untrue or misinformed. That’s simply not fair.

• It helps companies engage better with their customer base. A company that’s been dragged through the mud, with or without justification, is much more likely to actually listen to what people are saying about it.

• It means you don’t have to be dull. Hear me out. Imagine your company wanted to do something new and exciting but were worried that it might flop and attract negative attention online. A reputation should at the very least be interesting and reputation management means you can take those risks that would otherwise be too dangerous.

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Nervous? No, never, not me. With a refreshing glass of water obligingly pushed into my hand (wish I’d hit the complimentary wine a little earlier- it was all gone by the time I felt composed enough to partake- that’ll learn me eh?) and lashings of deep fried goodness to take on any tummy rumbles, I surveyed the scene. Packed to the ceiling with glamorous (not a brace or monobrow in sight) tech ladies (and a few chaps), I did a quick positioning check to see if my name-tag sticker was ok and dived into the fray…

I found the whole evening very rewarding. The talks were informative without being too heavy for a Tuesday in the pub and the general atmosphere was really friendly and non-intimidating. First up was the birthday girl Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis, who delivered a rapid-fire synopsis of ‘SEO- The Core Elements’. Useful to a noob like myself (I’m still suffering from a slight case of jargonitus), the Q&A session allowed a few more in depth issues to come to light.

Next was Sheila Farrell who spoke passionately about the importance of separating content and design on your website in ‘Semantic Markup and Organic SEO’. I’m not a natural techie, so quite a lot of this was over my head (but I still took notes!) For me, the most interesting point was how crucial accessibility is as the Internet becomes more widely used across a full range of platforms refined for every kind of user.

Finally, Sarah Mcvittie (of CEO Texpert fame) took to the floor. She started with an interesting ‘vision’ of where her team see their service in 2010- a fully functional, tailored service there to be used with ease whenever the situation requires it. You can read more about mobile search in our interview with Texpert CEO Thomas Roberts. A great presentation and an even more engaging Q&A session after. The most interesting point I took was exemplified with the texpert query asked a few years ago: Which office did The Office in the office merge with?

Zzzz….. Goes some way to showing how human powered search is likely to hang around for quite a while! (The answer of course is the Swindon branch of Wernham Hogg).

All in all, a successful evening and a chance to meet some of the faces behind the names- I look forward to next time! A big thank you to Sarah Blow for organising the event.

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Google has a new policy that all AdWords display URLs must match destination URLs.

I think they must be confusing ‘domain’ with ‘URL’. The guidelines say:

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s Display URL matches its Destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

But they then go on to say that:

www.google.com/extratext

Would be an acceptable display URL for the destination URL:

http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous

(the sub-domain is allowed because it is the same domain - this is explicitly allowed by the guideline).

Now, unless I am missing something, sub.google.com/miscellaneous and www.google.com/extratext are both URLs and they do not match (contravening the introduction to the new rule). What is true is that the domains of the two match and I think this is what they are trying to say.

Could be a helluva lot clearer, in my opinion.

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A lot of search conversation online is about:

• online marketing (of one form or another) - often including encouraging more conversations about a client online
• reputation monitoring - in real time and looking at both alerts about bad news and information about the spread of good news
• reputation management - sometimes not so different from regular SEO, but with different goals

Research is an area that is often over-looked (beyond the research needed to do the above - e.g. keyword research).

Large brands often care intensely about a level of detail that simply doesn’t break onto the radar for small businesses. One area that we have found ourselves doing more of recently is analysis of online conversations, share of voice, positive and negative slants and tracking the way conversations spread.

I have sometimes felt that it is a bit strange that I should be a good person to do this kind of thing, but with a background in stats, consulting and (obviously) search, I have been able to dig out a few tricks that help with the analysis.

One of these tricks is what I wanted to share today.

Background - why am I doing this?

When you are measuring share of voice and tracking the spread of conversations, you are sometimes in the position that you were tracking the topic from the beginning, but sometimes you need to do the analysis retrospectively.

When you are digging into something retrospectively, you can carry out all kinds of search on a variety of platforms - regular search engines, dedicated blog search engines and buzz or reputation tracking tools, but the output is typically HTML and RSS.

Now, I find that Excel is by far and away the best tool for slicing and dicing data (I love the way the new Excel makes pivot tables and pivot charts so much easier by the way). It is not particularly easy to get data from an RSS feed into Excel in order to cut and splice.

In order to save you from the pain of data entry or grep / sed / awk hacking, I wanted to present an easy way to do this:

How to get RSS information into Excel

For example, earlier this week, I was analysing discussion about Sharon Osbourne and Vic Reeves at the Brit Awards (they had a bit of a bust-up, possibly because they represent competitors in the bingo space).

So, supposing I want to get information into Excel about blog posts about both of them. I could start by creating an advanced Google blog search in order to find posts mentioning both names published in the week after the Brits. Then:

• Create a Google Docs spreadsheet
• Go to your blogsearch results page
• Copy the URL of the results as RSS
• Create a formula in your Google Docs spreadsheet containing:

=importfeed(rss-url,,true)

Make sure you wrap the URL in double quotes. The empty second argument is for restricting which bits of data you want from the RSS (the help is very good). The ‘true’ third argument says you want a header row to tell you what your columns are. If you want to add a fourth numerical argument, you can limit how many rows you return.

Once you have done this, the information from your RSS feed (in this case your custom search) is pulled into the spreadsheet - you can then either work on it there or (more likely) export it to Excel and work on it locally to make some cool charts and graphs for your presentations.

When I first needed to do this, I was just about to dive into an hour-long task of faffing with the data, before I thought of doing this. An hour-long job then took literally 5 minutes. Happy

Other cool things Google Docs can do

I haven’t had a play with the rest of the functionality yet, but just the names of some of the other functions imply that they might be pretty cool:

=importXML()

=importHTML()

The importHTML() function appears to be able to drag data in from html tables or lists. Potentially hugely powerful.

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In the course of some of the work we have been doing recently, we have been thinking about the differences in mobile usage between the UK and the US. There are a lot of reasons why people use phones differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic:

• Early technology differences in the networks
• Business model differences from the networks
• Different handset adoption patterns (caused by technology and business model differences)
• Geographical differences
• and a variety of other social and technological factors

Without getting into the usage differences too much, I wanted to highlight two key language differences that I think have a significant impact on people’s way of thinking about much of mobile.

Cell vs. mobile

Handsets are ubiquitously called mobile phones (or mobiles) in the UK.

In the US, the normal terminology (from the cellular communication underpinning the network) is cell phone (or cell).

In and of itself, this different is not particularly noteworthy, but, when combined with one more factor, I think it provides a fascinating insight.

In both countries, the buzz is all about mobile internet (and, to a slightly lesser degree, mobile search). In the UK, my belief (given that we call the handsets ‘mobiles’), this is equivalent in people’s minds to ‘internet / search on the handset’.

I am not the right person to speculate on the US, but the fact that it isn’t the ‘cellular internet’ leads me to think that there would be a tendency for the man on the street to think about the ‘mobile internet’ as potentially distinct from the handset and more about any kind of internet access on the move (e.g. a laptop with a data card).

I have no data to back this up - it is pure speculation - but in conversation with a few Americans, I have gathered a bit of anecdotal evidence that there is a different way of thinking about the meaning of ‘mobile’ as it pertains to the internet.

Operator vs. Carrier

The other difference has less of an impact in my opinion, but I find it interesting the way the languages have evolved in parallel.

In the UK, we talk about mobile operators, mobile networks or, officially, MNOs: Mobile Network Operators. (There used to be 4 main operators: Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile. They were joined by 3 a the 3G spectrum auctions and there are also now a variety of so-called MVNOs: Mobile Virtual Network Operators who don’t actually run a network but offer a branding / pricing / customer service differentiator piggy-backing on an established operator’s network e.g. Virgin Mobile, Tesco Mobile(+)).

In the US, the primary terminology is carriers (e.g. Verizon, Cingular).

As Orwell noted, the words we use to describe things have a huge impact on our feelings about those things. By calling the networks ‘carriers’ in the US, as mobile data services grow, there is a tendency to think of them as providing ‘just the pipe’. The carriers are desperate to avoid the fate of their fixed-line cousins who found themselves in a commoditised market shuttling bits between content providers and consumers. In the UK, I think the pull of the content providers will prove stronger than the walls on any kind of walled-garden ‘mobile internet’, but the ‘operator’ terminology could be seen as an attempt to make it sound as though there is more to the job than just ‘carrying’ the bits - that they need to somehow ‘operate’ the whole system to make it work well.

MVNO

Incidentally, Tesco’s MVNO, which is powered by O2’s network could become a hugely-powerful force in the UK, in my opinion. T-Mobile’s MVNO plays have been hugely successful for them in increasing network usage gathering marginal revenue that wouldn’t otherwise have been on the table and combining O2 (currently the UK’s ‘cool’ operator, with the iPhone) with the brand, power and reputation for cost-effectiveness of Tesco could be huge.

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Users of google.co.uk will be familiar with the choice to trim results from ‘the web’ to ‘pages from the UK’ when searching. For those of you who aren’t, it’s just an option to refine your search from the google.co.uk page- the default is ‘the web’, but there is the option just to search UK pages:

The results this modification bring in are notoriously arbitrary at the best of times although, to the uninitiated, they may seem the most obvious way to find the most relevant search results to their query.

According to Clear Site Marketing, “stats indicate that something like 50% of all visitors use the ‘pages from the UK’ option”. This seems a bit high to us, but we haven’t found any stats to contradict it. Regardless, it’s likely to be a volume worthy of attention. So what does it do? What’s the attraction?

Running a few searches for queries that might ideally return a local result didn’t reveal anything of great interest. A search for ‘coffee shop’ on google.com, google.co.uk (the web) and google.co.uk (pages from the UK) gave the following results: (I’ve highlighted all replicated results so you can track it more easily).

These results are more or less what you’d expect. The short-tail input means there’s very little chance of turning up a specific ‘local result’, in the sense of a coffee shop that you can physically visit, in any of the variations. It’s interesting to see how the wikipedia result has been moved off the page for the UK pages, even though its tld is .org rather than anything more incriminating (such as .com). In contrast, a .net made it in the UK pages results. The reason for this may come to light (or at least come a bit closer to the light) with a look at some other search terms. It certainly gives an indication of what’s to come….

Changing tact a little, searching for ‘ipod’ from these three starting points brings much meatier results.

‘ipod’ obviously has a much stronger online brand than ‘coffee shop’ and it only refers to one thing. So what is the differential? (Yes, I did feel a bit like Dr House then).

Well, the most immediate thing to jump out is that Apple has no presence whatsoever in the UK pages results. This caused much debate in the office and you can look forward to a dedicated post on it soon.

The second point to notice is that the two sets of results from .co.uk are very similar if you take away the top three slots on ‘the web’ results. Imagine they’re not there, and just bump the results up three places- it’s like seeing double (well, nearly). Optimisation efforts across .co.uk and .com don’t mirror each other this closely (ie. if you move up two slots in .com that doesn’t necessarily mean you move two places in .co.uk, or vice versa). This implies that although there is some difference across the two .co.uk algorithms, the results are essentially the same, but with different filters in place.

Did you already know that? I didn’t. I thought a .co.uk (UK pages) result would deliver pages that had specifically optimised for local results. According to Rand’s whiteboard Friday video on the subject, there are several different methods for this.

Surely one of the best ways to appear prominently in a UK pages result is to host your site in the UK? So how come the top result www.ipod.org.uk is hosted in Belgium? This implies that efforts to locally optimise a page aren’t that effective on their own, but what ranks in ‘the web’ ranks in the ‘UK pages’ as long as it has a .uk somewhere in the tld (a domainname.com/uk just won’t cut the mustard), right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. If you look back to the ‘coffee shop’ results, there are four .com’s and one .net in the top ten ‘UK pages’ results. If you can’t get hold of that crucial .uk, then it seems the alternative is to host your site in the UK. *

I think that’s pretty harsh for all the UK based businesses that happen to have a .com tld and want to host outside of the UK- they’re essentially missing out on a large percentage of google.co.uk searches.

It must be pretty cool for these guys though:

• That works up until the last result www.holylochcoffeeshop.com – a website with a .com tld and an ip address that’s hosted in Germany- your guess is as good as ours!

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This is a pretty exciting time folks - I’ve been tagged in my first internet meme by Cher from Nic n Cher!

So here goes, 8 random things about me:

1) I don’t eat pigeon. I’m not vegetarian (not by a long stretch! - I spent about £30 in the butchers at the weekend on belly pork, haggis and venison mmmmmm) but pigeons have a special place in my heart. Either that, or it’s the image of mutilated pigeons with broken wings feeding off dirty McDonalds in the street which puts me off - whatever it is though I don’t eat pigeon. Anyway, they’re tiny birds, I’d rather eat a Goose or something with a bit more meat on it

2) I play a fair amount of poker (any interest in a UK SEO-poker tournament?). One day I’d like to pack this whole ‘working’ business in an go and live in Vegas and play poker for a living.

3) I’m in the process of writing a sit-com and a book, I suspect I’m too lazy for either of them to ever see the light of day. If anyone has any contacts in the comedy business though please let me know!

4) Despite being an internet junkie I’ve never uploaded a video to youtube, never had a myspace page and never bought anything off ebay. How 1995 of me.

5) I have various allergies (technically chemical intolerances) to various foods. Because of that - I don’t drink (alcohol that is - water, no problems).

6) I’m into pretty alternative music, books and films.

7) Mornings are not my strong point and I think the snooze button is the work of the devil. I’ve been known to snooze my alarm for over 2 hours before.

8 ) I love Japanese and oriental culture. From Bonsai trees and Japanese pop to Buddhism and Samurai I love it all. If the professional poker player thing falls through I’ll probably become a Buddhist monk.

Sorry for the fluff post - more cutting insights into online reputation management, seo and geo-location shortly! (What? I might as well spam the post with a few links while I’m at it )

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To make up for not being in the newspapers on Sunday (after two weeks in a row), I had the great pleasure of appearing in an SEOmoz whiteboard ‘Friday’ (which wasn’t on Friday since they filmed loads at SMX last week).

Duncan and I had a great time meeting old friends and making new friends last week, and getting a chance to speak with Rand, one of our best buddies on the other side of the pond, about internationalisation issues was a huge highlight for me.

Props to Rand for making it look so easy - I was very nervous, but he is a class act and huge shout to Scott for his great editing and for getting rid of the passers-by who walked in front of the camera!

Without further ado, go and watch it at source: ranking foreign domains or view it here:

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