“…does Twitter have any SEO value?”

This question came to George via Twitter last night about the value of using Twitter as a part of your SEO strategy.  Twitter is a great social networking tool to create relationships with your ‘followers’ about the activities of your business.

From a structural standpoint, Twitter creates a “nofollow” tag advising Search Engines to ignore all posted links.  While it is not primarily an influential SEO tool, it is an invaluable SMO (Social Media Optimization) tool.

Twitter and other social media tools, like Twitter, are primarily extensions for your branding and awareness strategy, which will allow you to manage your credibility as a source for influencing the generation of SEO opportunities.

From a traffic perspective, many bloggers and businesses are using Twitter as an incremental source of traffic and link juice with varying degrees of success.  Twitter’s primary benefit is the ability to create a viral marketing tool delivered to a willing audience.

Take, as an example, @ricksanchezcnn.  In July Rick Schanchez of CNN began to use Twitter as a means to communicate with and market to his viewers.  As a result he has claimed to have seen a rise in his ratings as a result of the interactivity between himself and his viewers via Twitter.

Rick Sanchez has been able to convert his Twitter activity to an increased audience.  If you follow Mr. Sanchez, you will notice that his posts are not just questions about news items.  Often times you will find him posting about his family time, or impressions of something he just saw on TV.

Social Media tools allow you to put a personality behind your brand, learn more about your customers through interaction.  When thinking about Twitter as a source of traffic, think about how your personality builds the type of goodwill and awareness into business.

It is telling how the further we stray from the corner store, Social Media has inserted those concepts and values that made the corner store the engine that drove our commercial decisions.

In short, Twitter is not an SEO tool. Twitter is one of the great online PR and marketing tools that can be used to build your brand and client base through “word of mouth” and personality.

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you — and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people’s lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced “10 to the 100th”), Google’s initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning.

“These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact,” Google said in a news release. “We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition.”

More >

Many small businesses do not rank high enough in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to be found. Yet, more than 70 percent of internet users start off with a search engine before they buy a product or service. To put this in perspective, there are 157 million active internet users in the U.S., and 127 million of them are active search engine users, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Can you really afford not to be exposed to such a massive audience?

Read More

One of the most important roles that search engine optimized content plays for your website is raising your page rank and search engine rankings. Web content writing that is informative, easy to read and easy to understand is one of the best methods of increasing your search engine rankings. While website content that is optimized for keywords leads to raising your search engine results page rankings, another major way by which content helps in increasing your page rank is back linking.

Search engine algorithms pay considerable importance to the number of back links that a site has in virtual space. Web content writing, which includes articles and blogs can be posted on other websites with a back link to yours. On the other hand, you can also allow people to use your web content for free if they provide a back link to your site. The key here is to provide content that is valuable to a large group of people. Writing blogs is another method of quickly increasing the number of your back links and increasing your page rankings.

Professional network company LinkedIn has taken strides into the online marketing sector with the launch of the new LinkedIn Audience Network.

The network will allow marketers to target professionals more specifically and effectively, the firm suggested.

Steve Patrizi, the company’s advertising sales manager, implied the move was the result of LinkedIn listening to what the marketing industry wants.

“They want mass reach against specific segments of decision-making professionals and they want their ads to appear in quality environments,” he remarked.

LinkedIn has more than 27 million members, making it the biggest internet network for professionals on the planet.

It claims that every single company on the Fortune 500 list is represented in some form in its membership base.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn announced that it was to launch Company Profiles, which was designed to enable its users to find out about firms that they are interested in and enable these businesses to contact possible customers or employees at the same time.