SEM Wired

Despite the world economic downturn, Apple gets 3 spots on the top ten. One of his products got this popular to overtake it’s own brand.

I guess this is the best demonstration of how innovation, research and real care for customers needs can actually make any company grow, in spite of the worst crisis ever.

By the way, check the original article here, at Marketing Charts.

According to this CNET report,  Twitter will feature a search algorithm which will be able to:

crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages. [...] Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon [...]

After all, it was easy to predict. Plenty of people has been wondering that this would have happened sooner or later.
The question is if it would be able to gain a tiny share of the search engine market, considering Google evergrowing power and

If they really want to go this way they should come to terms with two main issues:

Gain some content authority

They should get a rid of all those bots and try to better develop and organize a following system able to guarantee some sort of authority: too many people add friends randomly trying to get hopefully followed themselves. This can affect link reputation and ranking system, if they’re really keen to develop one. I guess this is the first issue the should deal with.

Get safe and make people feel safer

Hacking Twitter is a bloody joke. It’s unbelievable easy. They must deal with it and sort things out as soon as possible. No service can grow in the market if people do not feel safe enough to use it and share data.

However, Twitter is still able to seduce investors. I guess it’s the proof that its search model could really work anyway. New rumors are spreading about Apple considering investing some bucks on it.
Apparently this first quarter Apple’s financial result make people wonder what will be the next step: maybe buying Twitter or jump into the videogame bandwagon with Electronic Arts?

Whatever will be, Twitter has already gained a prominent position into the market, soon things will change, and Google will have to make its move.

We all know the importance in today web of social networks. Nowadays even seo firms consider specific actions such as social media optimization when working on linkbuilding strategies.

The ongoing democratization of the web is leading the internet towards a collaborative juggernaut which autonomsly decides what’s interesting and what it is not… finally the silent majority of the modern world has got a media to express itself. Therefore, a successful internet entity, whether it’s a company or a personal website, has to be able to manage its presence and reputation on social network platforms, also considering this as a standard metric for feedback.

Beside all this gibberish philosophical intro, the bottom line is: can we track traffic (and other metrics) coming from the main social network platforms with Google Analytics?

VKI studios came out with another great extension for firefox which basically appends at the end of each page report a list of social bookmark website in which the page has been mentioned.

By this time, the report includes the following social bookmarks:

• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Sphinn (SEO social bookmark)
• Mixx

It also checks the page status on Yahoo Website Explorer. I hope this will come handy, but more importantly, to have your pages on one of these social bookmark

This plugin is available only in english and requires GreaseMonkey.

15 years ago only very few companies had bought their own internet domain (most of the times with an awful looking page). At the times,  very few understood the importance of the internet would have gained in the coming future.

Nowdays everything has changed. The way companies market their products on the internet (and their own brands) has been heavily affected by the internet itself.

It’s not like tv  anymore: customers have the chance to express their opinions, hence markets slowly became conversations in between producers and consumers.

Given that, online reputation in social media and websites has gained an increased importance for companies.

Here’s a shortlist of the most useful online tools and application check your online reputation and make sure everybody is really satisfied with your product.

Beware of the bloggers

Compared to other internet platforms, blogs are the places which can sparkle really interesting and truthful conversations about products and their consumers from the consumers themselves.
It’s really easy to get involved (with comments for instance) and bloggers are not afraid to express harsh opinions or critics.

Hence the first place to go if you want to really know about your own reputation,  would be blog search engines:

• Google Blog Search
• Technorati
• Yahoo Blog Search
• Blog Search Engine

You might be also interested in blog comments. Here’s a more specific tool which keeps track of blog comments:

• Backtype

Please do not feed the trolls

Before blogs, before PHPBB, even before IRC chat there was only USENET.
It went into a steep decline in the past years due to the overcome of more mainstream internet communities, vertical portals, forums with fancy colors and no need of weird geeky clients to connect (one of the worst aspect of USENET usability) but USENET has been the very first place of discussion on the internet right after the rise of local BBSs.

While doing some research on this post, I bumped into a usenet message I wrote several years ago… it was still there. This is the downside of this service: messages are casted in stone.

Make sure to check this few websites. USENET works as a redundant system of servers: if you manage to delete a post on a local server owned by your ISP, you’ll need to delete from all the other servers in which the same message is stored in other to be 100% cleaned up…

• Big Boards

• Google Groups

The twitter era

In order to criticize someone you won’t need that many words. 140 are enough. Get your hands on the twitter search  and rummage for any clue that my lead to an unsatisfied client.

Twitter brought the internet back to its essential meaning (basic interface, great ease to use and an evergrowing community of users), and if you’re a twitter user yourself you know how easy is to get into any interesting discussion about any kind of product.

• Twitter Search
• Twitter Vision

Search social

Imagine to be able to rummage through Facebook, Mybloglog, LinkedIn, Typepad, WordPress, Blogger at the same time. Quite of a tool if you think in terms of reputation check, especially because these are focused on social networks.

• Samepoint
• Socialmention

Search for people, not keywords

This is more if you getting worried about your personal reputation rather than your company or your product’s.
It’s also useful if you’re looking for info about a prospect employee or a dodgy coworker…

• 123people
• ZoomInfo
• Yahoo People Search
• Peoplesearch

Anyway, the list of online apps you might want to use to check your reputation is endless. The web is a total ongoing permanent conversation, communities, chat, forums, social networks… conversations sparkle everyday, on every topic. It’s up to you to find the right niche and start searching.

Ever wondered of managing redirect without Google getting to know about it?

We can actually play around with CSS in order to redirect pages and traffic. Since this trick will involve only CSS, we can be pretty sure of going unnoticed by search engines still achieving what we want.

This trick still uses Javascript in some sort of way. But the good thing about it is that CSS code does not get analyzed by Google.

Now, just think about all the possible SEO exploits this trick can have…!

We just need these three files:
redirect.htc

<attach event="ondocumentready" handler="redirect" />
<script language="JScript">

function redirect() {
window.document.location.href = 'http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com';
}

</script>

Then redirect.xml

<?xml version = "1.0"?>

<bindings xmlns = "http://www.mozilla.org/xbl" xmlns:html = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<binding id = "redirect" applyauthorstyles = "false">

<implementation>
<constructor>
//

var elem = this;           // maintain a reference to the bound element

window.addEventListener('load',
function()
{
location.href='http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com';
},false);

//
</constructor>
</implementation>

</binding>

</bindings>

index.html code

<style>
body {
behavior:url("./redirect.htc");
-moz-binding: url('./redirect.xml#redirect');
}
</style>