Author Archive

Twitter recently rolled out its new iPad mobile application.  Go to the App Store to get the latest version.  Here’s a review of 5 cool features.

1. The application is made for the iPad. The previous application was just the iPhone version.

2. See multiple “views” on one screen. The new app allows you to see snippets of more than one view at a time.  This is basically a visual “breadcrumb.”  Unfortunately, there are a couple of instances when things get “stuck” and it is difficult to close the active panel.

3. Article/image previews on tweets. Click on an item in your timeline and see the tweet with the article preview below.  This saves a click and gives you a good idea if you want to continue and read the  article.

With the release of Flipboard, there has been a movement towards visual browsing of  tweets.  This is a great next step for Twitter.

4. “Faux” attachments on tweets. Twitter still doesn’t allow for attachments but this “Attachments” screen simulates that action.  On a new tweet, click on the paper clip and you get access to your iPad photo album.  The Twitter app ties in third-party image hosting companies to accomplish the faux attachments.

5. Integration with services.  The app also allows users to connect to third-party services like Posterous for image and video posting.  Video posting?  Apparently the Twitter app is ahead of the iPad development curve and is already listing different video services.

I was surprised by the way the app “knew” how to select my Posterous account since  I never use Posterous on the iPad.

Review

The new Twitter for iPad app is a great step in the right direction – it uses the iPad’s space intelligently and it incorporates preview features like rich desktop apps.  I tested some of the “gestures” mentioned in the Twitter blog post but they weren’t intuitive so they’ve got some work to do there.  All in all, it’s a must download.

Did you see any other great features?  Overall, do you like what Twitter has done?

I use Google Analytics to track activity to and from my blog. Unfortunately, there are a lot of holes in that process, especially related to Twitter clickthroughs.

• First, some users bookmark the page, then revisit the site. These visitors are great because they found value in the site and are coming back for more. However, there is no way to tell if someone actually bookmarked the page or if something else happened.
• Other visitors arrive here by clicking on a link from a mobile Twitter application. Several of these applications remove the “referrer” information which causes another question mark when I go to check stats.
• If a visitor is using Internet Explorer and clicks through on a link from a site that uses a JavaScript popup, then the referrer information is lost. This sounds like a minor case but if you’re doing hardcore tracking to drill down on a marketing campaign’s ROI, this factor can be maddening.
• Lastly, if a visitor clicks on the Tweet Button and posts a link to Twitter, the URL is “automagically” shortened via Twitter’s link service (http://t.co). If a user clicks on a tweeted out link, you’ll know that the visitor came from Twitter but you won’t know where the link originated. Did a user get there from clicking on a Tweet Button link? Did someone cut and paste the blog post’s URL from the Web browser into a tweet? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Benefits

Before I started using this Google Analytics tracking technique, 16.8% of my traffic was showing up as “Direct Traffic.” After I started tracking Tweet Button clicks and Feedburner subscription clicks, that number went down to 13.45% and a new “Other” figure emerged.

This is awesome because now I can examine the behavior of visitors who click on the Tweet Button. Do Tweet Button visitors stay longer, visit more pages, or take key actions? Now I can answer some of these questions when before it was a mystery.

Because a good chunk of my blog’s traffic comes from Twitter interactions, you can see that the TweetButton clicks are in the site’s top 10 Traffic Sources. I can also see individual stats related to these visitors such as Bounce Rates, Time On Site, Goal Conversions and more.

The Hack

We’re going to address the last case with this next hack. In order for this to work, you won’t be able to use the standard Tweet Button plugin. We’ll have to add the button by hand.

1. Go to the Google URL Builder Tool page.
2. Enter your site’s URL.
3. Enter the Campaign Source, Medium, and Campaign Name. I used “Twitter”, “TweetButton”, and “Blogpost” respectively.
4. Click on the “Generate URL” button. This will build a link just below the button.
5. Copy the link. We’re mostly concerned with the end of the link, starting with the “?” mark.
6. Paste this code into your theme’s Header or Footer template files. I placed the code just before the < /head > tag in the Header.

   <script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

7. Configure your Tweet Button HTML code as in this example (for WordPress.org blogs):

   <!--Twitter tweet button-->
    <a href="http://twitter.com/share"
    data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweetbutton&utm_campaign=blogpost"
    data-via="jesseluna"
    data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>"
    data-related="niceblog:My Blogging Lab"
    data-count="vertical">Tweet</a>
   
   <!--/Twitter tweet button-->

   The main “hack” comes from the data-url parameter value where we add the Google Analytics formatted tracking parameters, just after the Permalink. This way, when Twitter shortens the link into it’s t.co format, the link value will contain the tracking information.

   In the above example, “data-via” is the Twitter user name that will appear on the tweet as “via .” “Data-text” is the text I want to display with the link.  In this case I’m displaying the post’s title.  “Data-related” is an optional related account that can be displayed. In this case I’m showing my blogging Lab account, @niceblog. The “data-count” value indicates how you want the button to appear on the screen. I chose a vertical format. You can see all the options on the Twitter Tweet Button blog page.

8. For WordPress.org blogs, paste the edited code into the Page, Single Post, and Main Index template files. I added the button just before the blog post content, after the title and date/author section of the templates. This will vary based on your preference and on other tweaks you’ve made to your theme.

I tried hacking Posterous and Tumblr blogs but the built in URL template tags kept blowing away the parameters once the Tweet Button was called. If you figure out how to do this please drop a comment and I’ll update this post.

Review

We just learned how to tack on a Google Analytics parameter to Tweet Button clicks on a WordPress.org blog. This will help you connect the dots on your online marketing and analysis activities.


If you find this useful, I’d be interested in how and why you would use it. Are you a marketing manager, a small business owner, or a code hacker? I’d love to find out.

We know about energy. We need it to heat our apartments and homes, we get more of it being around inspiring people, and we lose it when our bodies tire out. But I had never thought of emotional and physical energy as a business resource that has to be managed.

Traditionally, when we think of resources we think of time and money. If we are managing people then we realize that people are also resources so we add that to our list.

I suggest we should add energy to that list of resources.

Getting Things Done and Energy
The concept of energy as a business resource made sense after attending a Getting Things Done (GTD) seminar a few weeks ago. In the GTD productivity method, one sets up a series of “Next Actions” steps. These are discreet tasks that must be taken in order to advance to the next step of a project. In this framework, a project can be a large and complex production or it can be a simple as completing an office keeping function.

One participant at the seminar asked, “If you’re always working on the big projects, when do you have time for the little ones on your list?”

This is a classic workplace dilemma and one that can cripple productivity and zap communication.

The presenter’s response was, “That’s why you have different types of projects that must get done. If it’s Friday afternoon and you can barely stay awake, that might be a good time to change out the printer cartridge that’s on your Office Management project list, for example.”

I loved that response and it makes sense. If you’re working on a big project but just don’t have the energy to do an effective job at that moment, then completing a smaller task can actually get you back on track. Work with your energy, not against it.


Prioritizing By Energy
Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky on Twitter), CEO of Behance.com and author of Making Ideas Happen (affiliate link) sees energy management as extremely important in project management.

Energy is your most precious commodity. Regardless of who you are, you have only a finite amount of it. Just as a computer’s operating capacity is limited to the amount of memory (or RAM) installed, we all have our limits.

-P.59, Making Ideas Happen

Belsky suggests prioritizing projects based on energy level, ranking them on a continuum from “Extreme” to “Idle” in terms of their energy requirements. In this model, energy is equated with project importance, as opposed to the how-much-energy-do-I-have-at-that-time factor which the GTD presenter discussed. Either way, being mindful of energy is key to leading projects to completion.


Final Thoughts
I actively plan my daily schedule around my energy levels. Right now, my job search activities are the most important and deserve the most attention and energy. Because of that, I schedule my job search activities at the beginning of each day when I have the most energy and am in “work mode.”

When it comes to blogging, I often start at 10pm and work as late as my brain lets me. That’s when I can write most effectively and not feel like I have other higher priority tasks (or honey-dos) to accomplish.

Do you have formal systems in your workplace to help manage people energy? If so, what are they? How about energy management at home?


Related site:
Getting Things Done

Photo Credit:
Łukasz Strachanowski via Flickr

You don’t have to buy a book and take a seminar or ever buy a fancy blog theme to crank up your blog’s SEO Super Powers.

These top tips will help you zoom up the organic search rankings without breaking a sweat.

1. Use friendly post and page URLs for your new blog.

Quick Note: This tip works best for new blogs. See the BIG NOTE at the end of this item.

When you set up your blog, you will have the option to configure the way your page and blog post URLs are formatted. Search engines love URLs that contain meaningful and related keywords.

Good: http://< mydomain >/awesome-blog-post-title-with-keywords

Bad: http://< mydomain >/?p=45

The standard WordPress.org custom install defaults to the “Bad” URL structure. If you want to drive search traffic to your blog, switch the structure to one that includes the post’s title. In WordPress, you can change the settings from Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

In Tumblr, Go to Customize > Advanced, then scroll down and check on the “Use Descriptive URLs” checkbox.

Posterous has an SEO-friendly URL structure by default. This is an example of a Posterous URL: http://jesseluna.posterous.com/curating-tweets-on-flipboard-by-using-twitter. The URL is friendly to read and search engines like that.

Big Note: If you’ve had your blog for any length of time, changing your URL structure can have a huge negative traffic impact. Search engines will have already combed through your blog pages, indexed things and added them to search results. If you’ve had your blog for a while but don’t really care about past “traction” on search engines, go ahead and change the structure.

2. Use targeted keyword terms in your blog post titles.

Try to use one or two target keywords per blog post title. If you have a blog focused on non-profits then “How to talk to small nonprofits: A guide for vendors” is a great title. The title hits on two key terms, “nonprofits” and “vendors.” A Web search over those two terms would likely position that blog post on page one of search results.

An additional tip is adding a combination of not necessarily related keywords together. For example, I did a post on a Tweetdeck’s ability to post to Tumblr and now that post shows up in the number 3 spot for the search term “Tweetdeck Tumblr“, which ranks higher than tumblr.com, second only to Tweetdeck.com.

3. Use “Alt” tags on images.

Every time you use an image on your blog, add meaningful text to the “ALT” tag.

This is the structure of an image tag in HTML:

< img src="my-awesome-image.jpg" alt=”My-awesome-alt-tag-description” />

[Note: in this and other HTML samples in this post, I'm inserting extra spaces at the beginning and end of the text to keep WordPress from rendering the code. Just a warning in case you do any cutting and pasting.]

When search engines parse through your web site, they index image Alt tags. When more of your site is indexed, that means there’s more of a chance your site will show up for related searches.

Alt tags are also very important for accessibility reasons. Meaningful tags give blind and visually challenged readers a description of the picture which can help with context.


In WordPress, you can set the image Alt tag when you select an image:

In Tumblr, the “Caption” field in the Photo Upload tool will be the image’s Alt tag.

Posterous – As far as I can see, there is no way to set the Alt tag on a Posterous blog post image. Bummer.

4. Set “keywords” and “description” meta tags

Meta tags are bits of information that may be added to Web pages to help describe the contents of the page. The contents of the tags aren’t displayed on the page but search engines use the information in the tags to help rank pages and to help display them properly in search results.

I never meta tag I didn’t like. -Old webmaster’s joke

The two main meta tags are the “description” and the “keywords” tags.


Description meta tag
The HTML for the meta tag will look something like:

< meta name="description" content="This is my awesome two to three sentence, keyword-rich, description of this page. This is my second awesome sentence." />


If you want to get crazy with the description, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to get feedback on whether you tried to jam too much information into your description meta tag.


Keywords meta tag
Here’s the HTML for the keywords meta tag:

< meta name="keywords" content="Awesome-keyword-one, Awesome-targeted-keyword-two, Awesome-descriptive-keyword, Awesome4,Awesome5,Awesome6" / >


You will add highly relevant keywords instead of my “awesome” ones above. The keywords should be highly related to that specific web page and to the site. You don’t want to put too many keywords there. I usually keep the list to under 20 unless there are 25 products on the page or something like that in which case I list them all.

If you’re not sure which words best describe your page, you can use an offbeat tool like Wordle.net to visualize the page’s top keywords.

The image below is a Wordle.net keyword visualization of the YouTube Adds New iPad-Friendly HTML5 Video Player blog post. I copied the post’s text, went to the Create tab on Wordle.net then pasted the text into the “Paste in a bunch of text” field and ran it.

The diagram points out that the main page keywords were “player”, “html5″, “YouTube”, “Video”,”iPad”, and “Embed” because they were used the most in the post. Of course, if you have special target keywords that should be associated with the page, you’d want to list those as well in your keywords meta tag.

WordPress.org custom install blogs
In WordPress, to add meta tags you need to add a plugin that allows you to either set the meta tags or “builds” them dynamically based on some criteria. The most popular plugin is the All in One SEO Pack. This plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Once you install and activate the plugin, you can set it to build meta tags for each post based on the post’s tags. There are also a ton of other knobs and do-hickeys that you can set but describing them all is beyond the scope of this post.

Tumblr
If you are using a Custom Theme setup, you can set the meta tags but only on a global scale. In other words, you can’t set them on a per post basis. You can set the meta tags by going to Customize > Theme then setting the meta tag somewhere between the opening “< head >” tag and the closing “” tag.

Posterous
Posterous allows for custom meta tags but, like Tumblr, the tags can only be set on a global scale, not per post. You can set the meta tags by going to Settings > Look and Feel > Edit Theme > Advanced. Expand the area and you’ll see a couple of other meta tags. You can add your keywords and description meta tags immediately below those.

Review

We just learned how to use four key SEO tips and tricks to boost your search engine rankings and attract more site visitors. These techniques work with the content, not the other way around. You should never compromise your writing to make things more SEO friendly.

I will be adding more SEO tips in the comments over time (I didn’t want to overload you with this initial post). Feel free to comment and to leave your own tips and questions.

This post was made to be shared with the world. If you like it, set it free and share it.


Additional Resources: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF, 560KB)


Photo: Purchased via iStockPhoto

I ran into a cool backlink checker Web tool (or see the tool below) and thought I’d share it. Every time a web site has a link to your site, that is called a backlink (also referred to as an inbound link). Search engines love backlinks because that tells them that someone cares enough about your site to have a link.

I was blown away when I saw the over 1,200 links coming into jesseluna.com!

Why Check Backlinks?

1. To keep track of the number of inbound links. As your site grows and you reach out to Web communities and comment on sites, this number will grow. But you won’t know that unless you measure.
   
2. Because using the old “Link:< domain-name >” trick in Google doesn’t really work to show you all the Web pages that are linking back to you.
   
3. Because backlinks are a key factor in deciding how much “Google Juice” your site has. If you are being linked to from a site with high authority (think NY Times) then Google and other search engines will reward you with a better search results position.
   
4. So you can compare your backlink numbers to other similar but larger sites. This helps you keep concrete numbers in mind as you ask “how is my site doing?”
   
5. Mostly importantly, now you can work backlink data into conversations with Web geeks at cocktail parties.
   

How Do I Increase My Backlinks Number?

The best ways to improve the number of people linking to your site are:

1. Write awesome content that is link-worthy.
2. Build relationships with other sites/blogs and leave thoughtful comments, making sure to add your Web site address in the “Enter URL” comment text boxes. If the Comment form doesn’t have a space for your site URL then you should check the site’s commenting policy to see if it’s OK to leave a Web address in the Comment text.
3. Once you have a relationship with a blog site, suggest doing reciprocal links. In the early Web 1.0 days, linking to a site was a key way to reach out to new sites owners and was very common. Today, linking to other sites is much more strategic, especially for business sites.

Important Note: Not all inbound links carry weight.

Important Note Part Deaux: Google’s Webmaster Tools also include a Backlink checker tool. The feature is called “Links To Your Site” on the Tools site. However, I found that the iWebtool.com tool found many more backlinks.

How NOT To Create Backlinks

* DO NOT buy into spammy backlink sites or products.

* DO NOT leave comments on blogs for the sheer purpose of getting backlinks.

The Web is a beautiful place, don’t litter it with meaningless links.

Ready to Check Your Backlinks?

Here’s the tool. Enter your domain and a window will pop up and go to iWebtool.com.

Your domain:

(eg. www.jesseluna.com)

Was this post useful? Do you have any other thoughts on site backlinks? I appreciate your taking the time to visit this blog and to contribute to the conversation.

Remember, every time you leave a thoughtful Comment you get a backlink to your site!



Photo Credit: Nicocrisafulli on Flickr - license

I was pleased to finally receive the “Suggestions For You” feature since I’ve been hearing about it all week. My initial impressions were:

1. Dang, I thought I was following some of those people already
2. Um, I recently unfollowed some of those folks
3. I don’t engage much with some of the referral sources
4. There are a lot of celebrities on this list
5. These are real people, not feeds

Let’s look at these impressions individually and I’ll share some suggestions that will help Twitter’s suggestion algorithm.

1) Already following these people

No really, I thought I was already following some of the people that showed up. Is it possible people have been getting “disconnected” of the past few days? I saw the same reaction from others in my Twitter timeline. If Twitter “caught” the oversight then they did something right.

2) I recently unfollowed some of the suggested users

It happens. We unfollow people for one reason or another. Maybe they don’t engage with you, they say something that irks you, or you’re tired of following a particular celebrity. Many of the people who I had already followed and unfollowed were celebrities. I’ve already been to the show, I don’t need to go back.

Algorithm Improvement: De-prioritize accounts that one has already followed and unfollowed and especially those that have been blocked.

3) Don’t engage much with “Followed By” followers

Each Suggested User has several bits of information associated with her account – Name, Twitter handle, location, bio, and Followed By. All suggested users have two or more accounts in the “Followed By” field and I assume these are my main “connections” to the suggested user. But many of the people that appeared in the “Followed By” field where people who I don’t engage with on a consistent basis.

Algorithm Improvement: Follow Klout’s lead and make suggestions based on key connectors. Klout analyzes a user’s statistical influence and also lists users that are influential. These influencers should be the top “connectors” used in the Suggested User formula.

4) Lots of celebrities

This is where the asymmetrical nature of Twitter is a drawback to making equitable connections on the social graph. By asymmetrical, I mean that one can follow an account but the account doesn’t need to follow back. In contrast, Facebook requires people to follow each other to be “Friends” so that relationship is symmetrical. Extremely asymmetrical “nodes” in a network cause a warping in the fabric of the graph. If a celebrity (that doesn’t follow me or only a few others) suggests another celebrity that they follow then that’s a low probability match.

Algorithm Improvement:Turn down the volume on celebrity suggestions. These accounts will be easy to spot by the ratio of followers to people being followed.

5) These are real people

Every person on the Who to Follow list appear to be engaged Twitter users, not just piped in “feeds” from other social networking tools. Twitter got this right.

I follow 7,740 people on Twitter and am followed by 8,157 accounts and have new followers every day. I don’t use auto-followback tools so I have to manually go through my email messages and “vet” followers. Unless the account is extremely relevant to my interests, I don’t follow feed accounts. (This also means I’m way behind in reviewing new followers.) By filtering out feed-only accounts, this tremendously increases the chances of my following them. Good job Twitter.

Review

Twitter still has some work to do on making the Suggestions more relevant. I made suggestions but also gave Twitter kudos on some things it is doing right. This is much better than the old Suggested Users celebfest hyper-monetization list is had before.

What do you think? Did you see any other obvious algorithm improvements? What was your overall impression of the Suggestions For You feature?

Related Post:
TechCrunch – Twitter’s Social Graph Is About To Get Pumped Up. “Who To Follow” Is Social Steroids